


Dreams and Disasters

by stellarel



Series: Dreams and Disasters [1]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Drunk Doctor (Doctor Who), F/F, Friends to Lovers, Happy Ending, Mutual Pining, Slow Burn, bed sharing, i don't know what's going on but it's soft, psychic shenanigans, the Doctor has Feelings and she doesn't know what to do about that, the Doctor is a mess, the Doctor is telepathic and i'm here for it, the TARDIS may or may not be causing trouble on purpose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-10
Updated: 2021-01-04
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:54:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 20
Words: 33,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23575744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stellarel/pseuds/stellarel
Summary: The Doctor accidentally gets drunk. Some feelings spill out, perhaps.Telepathic weirdness, mutual pining, and some light adventuring ensues.
Relationships: Thirteenth Doctor/Reader
Series: Dreams and Disasters [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2075289
Comments: 111
Kudos: 193





	1. The one with the ginger

**Author's Note:**

> *TARDIS wiki voice*: Ginger make Timelord drunk

You walk into the TARDIS kitchen, deep in your thoughts and craving a nice, warm cup of tea to go with the book you'd been reading.

"Oh, hi! I borrowed your special honey, I hope you don't mind! There wasn't any of the ordinary one left, so I thought-" The Doctor is sitting at the table, smiling at you, her hair a little messy and her hands wrapped around a teacup. She looked like she was taking a break from...whatever it is she had been doing under the TARDIS console all day.

"Oh, okay. That's alright, don't worry about it." You give her a lazy smile. Pour a cup for yourself, too, and sit down.

She visibly relaxes, and starts stirring her tea, watching the golden honey blend in and trying to fish out her teabag. "Oh, good. This is good. Spicy. Can honey be spicy? I feel like this is spicy. What are the small bits?" She's staring at her cup, focused, as she talks.

"Ginger."

She freezes at this, and looks over at you. "Ginger?" She repeats, voice a little higher than usual. "Oh no."

You freeze in response, eyes wide. "What, oh no? Are you allergic or something?"

She frowns a little and looks down at her cup. "Eh, no-" she licks her lips.

"What? What's wrong?" You're starting to get more worried - even though if she's not allergic it's probably not anything that bad, but-

She sighs a little and rubs her temple. "Don't worry, I'm not allergic, it's just-" She closes her eyes and lets out a breath. "Ginger is kind of like a drug, to the Timelords. Makes us drunk, so to speak." She explains, and you watch her, carefully. Okay, so you didn't accidentally poison her, that's good, but now what?

"And if those were real, actual pieces of ginger, I believe I have about two minutes and thirty seconds before it hits me, hard."

You take a breath. "What do you want me to do?"

She glances at you. "I don't need you to-" She stands up, immediately losing her balance and stumbling a little. "-Ah. Less than two minutes and thirty seconds, then." She smiles lazily, and you stand up too, ready to catch her if she stumbles again. "My hand-eye coordination seems to be going slightly offline. But it's fine, I'm fine."

The Doctor isn't used to asking for help. She isn't used to people seeing her vulnerable. And she definitely isn't used to being drunk around you of all people. She's worried of what she might say or do, she doesn't like being this...clumsy, and she doesn't like feeling like she's losing control. 

You instinctively grab her arm, and she sighs a little, but doesn't argue. "Maybe I just need to lie down. Take a nap. Nothing a good nap can't fix. I love naps, naps are great. Good for the brains." 

"That sounds good. Come on, I'll help you." You say softly, trying to ignore how weird it is to see her like this. She's usually always the one helping other people, always in control of everything, and now she was leaning on you for support, and it seemed like she would probably fall over if she tried walking on her own.

"I don't...I don't need help." She tries to argue. "'I'm fine." It's not very believable, with the way you're supporting most of her body weight and whatnot.

"Well, let me just make sure you get to your room okay, yeah?" You try a different approach, and she lets out a quiet hum as a response.

You hope the TARDIS knows to show you the way to her room, because at the moment, it seemed like the Doctor might not.

You stumble into the corridor. "Which way?" you ask, partly from the Timelord and partly from the ship.

"No, I need to- I need to finish the repairs. The inertial dampeners-" She tries to protest.

"Sleep first, yeah?" You answer her, trying to get her to co-operate. The TARDIS hums softly, and there's a light flickering further down the hallway, and you take that as an answer and head towards it. A little surprisingly, the Doctor lets you guide her.

You reassure her she can get back to the inertial dampeners first thing tomorrow, and that you were sure the TARDIS wouldn't mind waiting. You were also pretty sure that the TARDIS wouldn't let her try to do any _repairs_ drunk, but you don't say this out loud.

As you stumble forwards, the Doctor keeps rambling about her repairs, and what she still had to do, and she just had a _really_ good idea about rerouting the excess heat from the power core to the pool, can you imagine that, a self-heating pool, wouldn't that be cool? She could heat a whole spa without even trying!

There's a door, and you stop in front of it. "Here?" you ask, now more so from the ship than from the Doctor, who had taken a sudden interest in twirling your hair around her fingers and was now humming something under her breath. 

The TARDIS lets out a series of _thrums_ and _beeps_ and you take that as a yes. 

It looked more like a mix between a library and a science lab than a bedroom, but then again, it was the Doctor's, so you weren't exactly surprised. Besides, there _was_ a bed, so you were pretty sure this was the right room. Even if the bed looked like it hadn't been slept in in weeks, if not longer, and the whole room was a lot more dusty than was probably healthy. But then again, this didn't exactly surprise you, either. 

The Doctor looked around. "You found my room!" She gasped. "I'd wondered where it went. Good job, ten points for you!" She grinned, and you smiled back at her, guiding her to sit on the edge of the bed.

"Well, I can't take the credit, to be honest. The TARDIS helped." You give her half a shrug, and she leans back, collapsing on the bed with a content sigh. 

"Did you know there's a planet where they live on houses with floors entirely made out of beds?"

You smile at this, and start unlacing her boots. "No, I didn't. That sounds fun. Impractical, but fun."

"We should go sometimes." She mumbles.

You get her shoes off, and decide that it's good enough. The rest of her clothes seemed relatively comfortable, she wasn't wearing her jacket, and you were pretty sure she had slept in those clothes before, so this probably wasn't anything new to her. She wriggles into the covers, with a content hum.

"Are you gonna be okay? Do you need anything?" You ask, wary of leaving her like this. Sure, you'd dealt with drunk friends before, but she was a Timelord. That had to be different, right? For starters, it had hit her harder and quicker than alcohol usually hit humans, and you had no idea where it would go from here. She might still need your help with something.

The Doctor looks over at you. "My head feels like it's full of cotton." She says.

She isn't used to asking for things. For herself. And she isn't used to talking about her feelings, or even admitting that she had feelings in the first place. But right now she was tired and lonely and her head was feeling all kinds of fuzzy and you were _there_ , and you were so nice and soft and kind and beautiful and good, and she didn't want you to go. She wanted you to continue being there.

So she takes a small breath. "Could you stay with me?" She asks, voice quiet, eyes careful. She studies you, worried she might have made you uncomfortable, but you just smile at her gently.

"Of course. I'll stay if you want me to." 

She smiled at this, relieved, and something in her hearts felt lighter.

"Great!" She grinned, and then gasped a little. "It'll be like a slumber party! I've never been to one of those!"

You chuckled quietly at her enthusiasm, then looked over at the bed. It was large enough for two people, easily, but this still made you feel a little anxious. Would she feel weird about this in the morning? Would you? Maybe you should just stay until she falls asleep and then sneak back into your own room. Or would that be worse? That would probably be worse. 

There's no need to read anything into this, right? She just didn't want to be alone. That's normal. That didn't mean she'd want you in her bed in any other scenario...right? This was just a one-time thing. Because she was drunk, and just didn't want to be alone. Right?

"We can have real slumber party later. Maybe just a nap for now?"

She hums quietly, with her eyes closed. "That sounds nice. I love a good nap."

You get into the bed, and she instantly pulls you closer, mumbling something into your hair. You don't understand what it is, but you don't really care, either, because being this close to her makes you feel like you could melt. So you let yourself relax, and try to tell your heart to not get too used to this.

Maybe she was just an affectionate drunk. That's all. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, ginger honey is a real thing.


	2. The one with the partially lucid dreaming

Okay, so _maybe_ The Doctor was slightly telepathic. And _maybe_ she could sometimes accidentally see other people's dreams, or, okay, yeah, _maybe_ she could sort of...slip into them. If she was close enough, or - well, especially if she was touching them. She didn't really think about this, though, when she'd made the decision to ask you to stay, with her, here, instead of having to sleep alone again. She didn't like sleeping alone. In that boring too-big useless room. She was tired of it. She'd just missed having someone...there. Close. She didn't like to show it, but god, sometimes she was just so _lonely_. 

So, she told the rational part of her brain to shut up, and let herself stay there. Just let her have this. With you snuggled up to her, your head on her chest and her arm protectively over you. She could blame it on being drunk in the morning, she's pretty sure that would work. A part of her brain was screaming at her, that she shouldn't be doing this, shouldn't let herself get too close to you, but she decided not to listen. And she fell asleep, listening to your breathing. 

She didn't do it on purpose. She doesn't think she did, at least. But her head was feeling super weird and you were just _there_ and for once she was _happy_ in a way that wasn't very common for her these days, and it was getting hard to tell where her dreams ended and yours began.

(That was a lie, it was pretty easy to tell, actually. Your dreams were considerably more calm and didn't have nearly as many dead people in them).

Fine, so maybe she did notice she was slipping into your dreams, but she was getting tired of fighting it. She felt bad about it, of course she did, but that part of her brain that especially liked serotonin was starting to win over the part that mainly just made her feel bad about things. She was tired, and she felt like her head was full of lukewarm water from the swimming pool (-is that a feeling? She was certainly feeling it, so it must be, right?) - and so maybe she just let herself slip.

_You were dreaming about the stars. Laying down somewhere, on Earth, by the looks of it, looking up at the impossibly dark sky full of stars and galaxies, getting lost in the vastness of it all._

_Did you miss home? Well, maybe there was something comforting in the familiar night sky when you've been traveling throughout the stars for a while. The Doctor would go back to watch the Gallifrey skies too, if she could._

_"Doctor?"_

_She turns to look at you, smiles, and sits down on the grass next to you._

_"What are you doing here?"_

_"Keeping you company." She gives you a small smile and half a shrug._

_She knows she shouldn't be doing this. It's banging at the back of her head, telling her to get out of your dream. But maybe, just maybe she could just stay here for a little while longer. It was so peaceful, so much calmer than her own dreams were, and you were here, and if she went back into her own dream again she'd be alone - she never quite managed to dream you there, not properly, anyway, it was always some sort of a mangled copy that was never just quite right, and honestly, she just wanted to rest. Just for a while. Her own brain never really let her do that._

_She lays down next to you._

_You look at the stars in silence, until she turns to look at you. She thinks she could almost see the stars in your eyes._

_"What?" You ask quietly, without turning to look at her._

_"Nothing. I just like looking at you when you're happy." She answers, a little too honestly. God, did she have to say the first thing that came to mind? What was up with her head feeling this fuzzy? It's like she couldn't think properly._

_You turn to look at her too, now with a small smile on your lips._

_Suddenly there's the familiar thrumming of the TARDIS, and you turn to look at the ship that was now materializing near you, and your smile turns just a little sad._

_Why do you look sad? Don't you like the TARDIS? The Doctor thought the two of you were getting along quite well._

_"Oh." You say quietly, sad and...disappointed. "Do you have to go?" You ask the Doctor, and sit up. She frowns at this a bit._

_She knows she shouldn't be here. Maybe she_ should _go._

_She sits up too. "Nah, I can stay. It's alright." She says instead, before her brain catches up with her mouth._

_You're standing up now, and she follows you. You look...tired, the Doctor thinks. Can somebody be tired if they're asleep?_

_"What's wrong?" She asks._

_You sigh quietly. "I guess I'm just scared you're going to fly away and leave me behind."_

_She lets out a breath, and looks up. She couldn't promise you she wouldn't leave you - that's not a promise she could make, not even in a dream. She knew that. Sure, odds were that you were going to leave her, instead, but there was still the chance that something horrible might happen that would force her to leave you. Besides, she had always been more careless with her own life than she was with yours - she wouldn't put it past herself to just die one day in some stupid freak accident while trying to pull off some ridiculous stunt that she was just a little too slow and/or unlucky for this time._

_"You could always come with me." She says, with her head a little tilted, hands in her pockets, smiling at the memory of when she had said that to you, the first time. "We could go see the stars. From up close."_


	3. The one where something happens

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Something happens. Maybe. Almost happens. Does it count if it's in a dream?

You know how in dreams, you're never really quite sure how you got there, but suddenly you're just there, completely immersed in whatever strange situation your subconsciousness had managed to cook up for you this time?

Well, that didn't apply to the Doctor. She could usually tell.

Usually.

It's strange. It takes a moment for her to realize that she's in a dream in the first place - mainly because you seem to be dreaming about the exact same thing that was happening before you fell asleep. It's the two of you, in her bed. Not doing much. Only this time she isn't half-coherently rambling about the inertial dampeners and neither of you seem to be going to sleep. You're just laying there, a little closer together than would be considered normal for people who insisted they were _just friends._

Some - or most - of the details were a little off, but she didn't blame you - her room did have a lot of stuff in it, and dreams always were just a little blurry around the edges anyways. Hazy. The details were only there when you focused on them, and she couldn't exactly blame you for _not_ focusing on the details of whatever half-finished projects she had left scattered around, or her personal book collection, or the exact color of her bed sheets (a very lovely shade of blue).

Also, the air felt considerably heavier than before. Electric. Kind of like how summer air feels before a thunderstorm.

A whole storm-to-be stuffed into a single room. That felt about right. It matched the heavy feeling between her ears.

_She looks over at you, and swallows. You're so close, and her head is feeling all kinds of fuzzy, and she can feel your breathing and your warm body pressed against hers, and is it bad that she really, really likes this?_

_It's bad._

_Right?_

Maybe if she just stays very, very still, this feeling will go away eventually. She'd been bottling it up and shoving it to the back of her head for ages, she could do that again. Probably.

But at the moment, her head felt like the inside of a TV screen that was only playing static, and it was tickling the inside of her skull, and could she really be blamed for not being able to think straight? She had eaten ginger, for god's sake!

(In her defense, she ate a lot of things she probably shouldn't and didn't think about it until after she'd already done it, and usually things turned out fine! How was she supposed to know this time would be any different?)

_She leans her head back with a small frustrated groan, trying to get her thoughts in order, and you turn to look at her._

If she can't have you in real life, could she at least have you in her dreams? Your dreams? Or, whatever this was? She wasn't sure whose dream this was, if we're being honest, but at this point, she didn't really even care. You were here.

Was that too much to ask?

_"What's wrong?" You ask her, tone quiet._

_"Nothing", she lies, a little too quickly and voice just a little bit too high._

_You raise a brow at this and turn a little, to face her better._

_"Doctor?" You drawl out, and it makes her face heat up. She looks over at you and swallows; the look on your face, the tone of your voice, the way you're looking at her, it makes her almost shiver._

This is bad. You're too close - she's not sure if she can control herself when you're this close and looking at her like that. 

_Would that be so bad? This is just a dream. It's not real._

_Do you know that?_

_She's not sure._

_Humans weren't usually aware that they were dreaming._

_You lean in closer, your hair tickling the side of her face as you reach up to her. "Liar." You breathe out, poke at her side a little, and god, she can feel your lips brush against her ear, and something inside of her just short-circuits._

_She can't see it, but she knows you're smirking._

_It wasn't fair._

_How was she supposed to keep herself in check when you were doing things like that? Looking at her like that?_

_She wasn't blind. And humans weren't exactly subtle with their pheromones and their dilating pupils and their extremely loud heartbeats. She could practically see what you were thinking, where you wanted this to go._

_And the worst part was that she wanted it, too._

_So maybe it's not one of her proudest moments, but when she feels your lips brush against her jaw she doesn't think, doesn't listen to what her brain has to say about this, she doesn't care if this is the sensible course of action or not, and she takes a shaky gasp and just lets herself have this. It's not one of her proudest moments, but it definitely is one that she'll be sure to burn into the back of her mind and store there for later._

_Her hands travel to your body on their own accord, and she doesn't know what to do, but she knows she wants you to keep doing whatever it is you're doing._

_She can feel you smile against the side of her neck, and she feels like she's walking on a tightrope (-not literally, she'd done that once and it hadn't felt nearly as nice as this, but you know. Metaphorically)._ _She could either stop this, she could push you away before anything else happens, or she could decide to leave this dream and pretend she was never even there, or-_

_Or she could let herself fall._

_She swallows, uselessly._

_"Do you even know what you're doing to me right now?" She mutters, before thinking it through, and closes her eyes. Lets her fingers absent-mindly trace circles on the curve of your hip._

_You smirk a little, hum quietly. "Maybe. Why?"_

_"Because it's working."_

_She looks over at you, and the silence is humming in her ears. Or maybe that's just the TARDIS. She brushes her fingers on your jaw, carefully, and licks her lips. Her mind is racing and she's doing her best to keep up, but your closeness was seriously intervening with that, at the moment. Your fingers were slowly running up her arm, leaving behind a trail of goosebumps._

_"So are you going to do something about that, or...?" You ask, the tone of your voice half question and half challenge._

_Her head is swimming (-is that a thing? She feels like it's a thing), and she's not sure how much of it is because of the residual ginger still sloshing around in her veins and how much is because of you. You smile at her, and she swallows and blinks away whatever self-restraint she had left, and_

_just lets herself fall._

_She lets out a quiet hum as an answer to your question, and lets her hand settle on your waist._

_Considering the amount of times she had thought about this particular scenario, she was a little surprised about not having a plan right now. But she's pretty sure she could just figure it out as she goes along. That's how she usually did most things, anyways._

_So after about half a second of thinking it over, she turns and lifts herself up, shifting her body so that she's now looming on top of you, essentially caging you down on the bed. She searches your eyes for a moment, for any sings of protest or discomfort, but she's having trouble finding any. She's not sure how she feels about that._

_You swallow, eyes wide and heart hammering away in your chest._ _She's looking at you with her eyes dark and her jaw set, hair falling over her face, and she's leaning closer, breathing heavy. You lick your lips a little._

_The Doctor can feel her heartbeats pounding in her ears. Or maybe that's the echo of a headache starting to form. She isn't sure._

_She doesn't know what she's doing._

_The Doctor is letting her eyes trail over you now, shamelessly, in a way she'd never dare to do in real life, at least not when there's a chance she'd get caught. You look absolutely delicious under her like that,_ she thinks.

_She knows exactly what she's doing._

_You run your fingers up her side, and when they reach her ribs she wraps her fingers around your wrist and lifts it just over your head. Not forcefully, never forcefully, but just strong enough to let you know where she wants you. Not because she doesn't want you to touch her, but because she wants this moment to last, and because she wants to feel like she's in control of that. You raise a brow a little but don't protest, and she takes the small smile on your lips as a sign that this was okay._ _She smirks at you a little, and her hand trails down your body, barely touching, settling in to the dip of your waist. She lets out a breath, closes her eyes, and leans her forehead on yours._ _Her hearts are beating so fast she's sure you could feel it, too, and -_

_And she can't believe this is happening._

You know how sometimes, in dreams, time just feels like it's stretching on forever and ever, but in reality the part where you're actively dreaming only lasts like three minutes? And other times it feels like barely any time has passed at all, but then you wake up and it's been eight hours? 

The Doctor knows this, and right now she's just hoping that time wasn't playing tricks on her. She wanted to stay in this stretched-out fake pocket universe of a dream for as long as possible, where things like this could just happen. She knows none of this makes any sense, you, her, this, but in a dream, it didn't have to. It didn't matter how you had ended up here, the point was that you had. 

But dreams are delicate, like that. They never make much sense and could fall apart any moment. She knew this, and it made her want to grasp at this with both hands and selfishly hold onto the moment. 

_"Are you going to do something, or are you just going to tease me, Doctor?"_

_She can feel your breath brush her lips, and it makes her head spin. She opens her eyes and leans back a little, to get a better look at you._

_She lifts an eyebrow slightly, playfully, and licks her lips._ _"You started it."_

_"Doctor." You say, almost whine, and something about it feels like you're saying 'please.' It makes something curl at the bottom of her stomach, the way her name sounds when you say it like that._

_And she shivers, a smile forming on her lips._

_She hasn't done_ this _in a while, and definitely not in this body,_ she thinks _, but they probably haven't changed the rules that much._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No notes. Head empty.


	4. The one where she wakes up

The first thing the Doctor realizes when she wakes up is that she's in a bed. Which is strange, because she doesn't really _'go to bed'_ as much as she works herself into exhaustion, eventually collapsing somewhere that usually wasn't, in fact, a bed. She was more used to waking up under the console than in her bed.

Her eyelids felt sticky.

The second thing she realizes is that there's a heavy, warm weight on her chest.

She's not alone. 

You know those moments when you're just waking up, and you're not really asleep anymore but you're not quite awake yet either? Yeah, half her brain was still there, while the other half was assessing the situation she found herself in.

The assessment: bad. This was bad. 

The feeling settled into her bones, heavy. She couldn't believe she'd done that, invaded your privacy like that, and she couldn't _believe_ what had happened in the dream - but that was a whole different issue completely, one for when she had her full brain power back in commission again. So, in approximately about three seconds, give or take. _A problem for future me, then. Looking forward to that,_ she thinks, and files the thought to the back of her mind. 

Right now she had other things to worry about - like the fact that she had just completely screwed up whatever good thing had been going on between the two of you. She had watched your dreams, without permission, and that was _bad_. 

Sure, she couldn't deny she had liked it, all of it (and that just made it worse) and maybe she had been more than a little disappointed when she woke up, but she still absolutely hated herself for letting it happen. She should know better. 

You were still asleep - humans, they needed more sleep than she did. Usually the fact annoyed and/or bored her, but right now she was grateful to have the darkness and the silence to herself for a while. To think this over, before you'd wake up and inevitably start asking questions. 

Her mind was racing, and she had to consciously keep her heart rate low -you _were_ laying on her chest, after all, and while she was pretty sure a quickened heartbeat wouldn't normally be enough to wake up the average human, she didn't want to take any chances.

Would you be mad at her when you woke up? Would you even realize what had happened? She wasn't sure if you could tell - dreams could be disorienting on their own, and she couldn't be sure that she _wasn't_ usually a normal occurrence in your dreams. Statistically, with how much time the two of you spent together when you were awake, it was likely you had probably dreamed about her at some point. Maybe not like _that_ , but still.

Counterpoint: it hand't exactly seemed like the scenario had weirded you out. 

The thought made her skin tingle a little - was this something you had dreamed about, before? 

Should she tell you she'd been more or less lucid? She probably should. But would that freak you out? It probably would. But maybe she deserved that. 

God, she had been inside your _head_. You had the right to know, even if you hadn't noticed it. Right? 

But what would you think of her, after that?

Sure, she had been drunk and hadn't done it on purpose, and sure, she's still not entirely sure whose dream that had been in the first place - there was still a non-zero chance that that had just been one of her...nicer dreams, and the whole drunk-on-ginger thing had just made it seem more realistic. That was a possibility. Maybe she _hadn't_ half-accidentally invaded your mind in her delirious haze. Maybe that's just what her dreams felt like when she's eaten ginger. That could be a thing. 

She still wasn't quite sure what had happened. 

For a silly little moment, before she woke up, a part of her had thought that maybe all that had been real. But then boring old reality settled into her bones again and she remembered what had _really_ happened, she remembered stumbling into the room with her arm around your shoulders, thinking about how nice your hair smelled and collapsing to the bed with only half her brain working. She remembered falling asleep. 

And then she saw you curled up next to her, breathing slow and with a peaceful look on your face, and most importantly, with all your clothes on.

She really wasn't sure whose dream that had been.

She _hoped_ that it had been hers, because that would mean that nothing happened, really, and that she _hadn't_ completely violated your privacy by sneaking around in your head without permission. If that had just been all in her head, then there was no harm, no foul. 

She really wasn't sure.

The thought crossed her mind that she _could_ just - 

I mean. She could just wipe away the memories of whatever dreams had been bouncing around in your head, no matter what they were about. Technically, yes, she could do that. It would be easy. She wouldn't even have to look what you were dreaming about, she could just...conveniently clear away any residual memories. That would also be totally non-suspicious, it was perfectly normal that people didn't always remember their dreams when they woke up, right? That happened, even without any Timelord meddling? 

She could do that, just to be safe. 

That scared her - both the fact that she knew she could do it, and you'd never know, and the fact that she even considered this, because that would kind of cancel out the whole point that invading your mind without permission was exactly what she _didn't_ want to do. 

The thought scared her.

You trusted her, and that made it all the more complicated. You trusted her, and if she did this, you might never trust her again. But then again, maybe that's what she deserved.

 _No_. She couldn't just go poking around in your head without permission, especially for such a silly reason. She couldn’t just go tampering with your memories because her _feelings_ might get hurt. Sure, maybe you'd hate her when you woke up, but maybe she'd deserve that, too. 

She wouldn't blame you. At the moment, she didn't like herself very much either.

She didn't know what to do. 

So the Doctor did what the Doctor does best.

She ran.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Am i physically incapable of letting 13 be happy? Maybe.


	5. The one where she runs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Doctor doesn't know how to deal with her emotions, so she....doesn't.

No, the Doctor didn't _physically_ run away from you, although she had briefly considered that, too. She just...decided to avoid the whole issue as much as possible. Rule one of dealing with things you don't want to deal with: Don't. 

She knew this wasn't going to really solve anything, of course, but that didn't stop her. By now, she had gotten pretty good at running away from her problems, and she wasn't planning on stopping anytime soon. 

So she pretended nothing out of the ordinary had happened, avoided any prolonged eye contact, kept herself busy, and picked up all the emergency transmissions she could find, even the ones that hadn't been sent yet. Just to make sure she didn't have the time to stop and think about this.

Life on the TARDIS was always hectic, no matter what, but now she seemed to be cranking up the whole 'running from one adventure to the next' -thing to a whole new level. 

Nowadays, she was usually already setting the coordinates to the next place while you were still catching your breath by the door. You were also pretty sure she had stopped sleeping altogether, because whenever you saw her, she was always right in the middle of doing something, going somewhere, and had approximately 5 half-finished projects going at all times. She was constantly doing things. Never stopping. 

_'I'm like a shark'_ , she'd said when confronted, _'I need to keep myself busy. If I stop doing things my brain will get bored and forget how to keep me alive.'_ She'd licked her lips. _'You know how you never really think about breathing, until you start thinking about it, and then you somehow no longer know how to breathe like a normal person? It's like that, but a hundred times worse.'_

You couldn't really argue with her, because really, you weren't an expert on Timelord biology so maybe that was true. But you didn't exactly agree with her, either. She didn't really seem to be taking care of herself, and that worried you. Sure, maybe she wasn't the most functional person anyways to begin with, and sure, maybe she did have a habit of putting other people's needs before her own, but this was different. 

She kept up her happy facade, she kept telling her funny stories in passing remarks and getting exited about new things and dragging you from one amazing place to the next. That hadn't changed. 

But she didn't quite look you in the eyes anymore, or when she did she always seemed a little distant. Didn't stay around for a cup of tea after a stressful day. Didn't hold your hand as she urged you to run from whatever trouble she'd stirred up this time.

The Doctor was avoiding you, and she tried to cover it up as 'I just need to finish these repairs, won't take long' and 'I must have lost track of time, I'm not used to it being so linear, you know' and 'Sorry, the TARDIS locked me in a room and didn't let me out until I put the temporal stabilizers back together'.

You suspected the last one was her version of _'I can't come, my mom said no'._

You tried to ignore it, but you could feel the way she was putting her walls up and pushing you away, and it _hurt_. You suspected she knew this; she seemed to be the kind of person who noticed other people's feelings even when she pretended not to. 

She had this look in her eyes, this kind of sad, kind of hurt, kind of half nostalgic look she'd get right as she pushed you a little further away - like she _wanted_ to reach out, to say something, but thought it would be best if she didn't, so she just stayed quiet, turned away, and disappeared somewhere into the inner workings of the ship where no-one could find her. 

It hurt, because you wanted to help her, you wanted to comfort her, but you knew she wouldn't let you. You didn't even know what was wrong, and you were pretty sure she wouldn't tell you if you asked. Not honestly, anyways. 

So when she slipped away once again, you let her.

Truth be told, the Doctor didn't especially _like_ being alone with her thoughts, right now. In fact, at the moment, her thoughts were being considerably more annoying than other people usually were, and that was saying something. But she also couldn't let herself spend too much time alone with you, so she spent hours and hours tinkering under the console instead, or pulling off the panels on the walls and rewiring the electrics, or picking up some old projects she had half forgotten already. 

She even considered rebuilding K-9 again. She didn't, though, because she suspected the metal dog might just be an overly annoying voice of reason, and right now that was the last thing she needed. Her own brain was being annoying enough, thank you, she didn't need anyone else nagging at her from _outside_ of her head. 

She knew she was being irrational. She knew she was just pushing away her problems instead of dealing with them. But she couldn't help it; she was _scared_. 

She wasn't used to being scared, not when it came to non-life-threatening situations, anyways. She didn't know what to do with it.

Or maybe she wasn't scared. Maybe she was just nervous. She had been stumbling over her own emotions for a while now, and she hadn't quite managed to figure out what to do with them yet. Sure, she knew how she felt, she had figured that out soon enough, but that didn't mean her head agreed with her hearts on it. 

Part of the problem was that you didn't seem to _not_ like her, exactly, but she wasn't sure that was a _good_ thing. She might be a little socially awkward but she wasn't blind, she had more or less figured out what was going on. She knew that you liked her, maybe more than you should. _Definitely more than you should_ , she corrected herself, and started pulling out electric cables from a hexagonal hole in the wall. That didn't really make her feel any better. 

This whole thing would've been a lot more easier for her if you hadn't been so... _human_. She could see the way you looked at her, so full of emotions and so heart-achingly optimistic, and really, it would've been a lot easier for her to push you away if you hadn't been so keen on staying right by her side. She knew you cared about her, and maybe a part of her liked that, but it didn't make her feel any better about anything else that was going on.

One, you were in danger if you got too close to her. That was just a fact. Whenever people got close to her, they tended to get hurt sooner or later. This had happened before, and she had enough supporting evidence to suggest that it would probably happen again no matter how hard she tried to prevent it. 

No matter how many times she saved the universe, the universe still seemed to be against her on this one. A bit of a rubbish deal if you asked her, but she didn't exactly know where she could complain about that. 

Two, you were human. Soft, and fragile, and so easily hurt. So young and so good and so full of feelings and with a whole future waiting for you back on Earth. You were _human,_ and she loved that, she really did, but it also sometimes made her feel like if she got too close she might ruin you. You were so _good,_ and so full of life, so full of hope, so full of light, and she was no stranger to darkness. She wanted to protect you from it. And right now that felt like it was synonymous with protecting you from _her_. 

And besides, she knew humans had a very limited lifespan. She knew you were going to leave her sooner or later, one way or the other, that was just how it was. And it would just hurt her so much more if she got her stupid romantic feelings involved.

(As if they weren't already).


	6. The one where she thinks about her feelings

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, I've been Real Life Busy so I haven't had enough time to fully write/edit the next chapter yet. BUT I'm v exited about it, and I wanted to do Something, so here's chapter 5.5; something that happens between the last part and the next one.

The Doctor was good at pretending. And acting, and lying, and putting on a mask that hid all the emotions she didn’t want to show. It was carefully calculated, all of it, the way she _seemed_ like she was honest and open and straight-forward, when in reality, there was just so much more going under the surface, all the time. 

She had learned that a long time ago.

It made things easier.

It also meant that very few people knew her beyond what she chose to show them. Sure, yes, she had let her pretenses slip around you before, she trusted you, and she tried her best to be honest with you when she could. 

But when it came to the Doctor, _honest_ felt a bit like a crack in a dam. Because if she let herself be truly, absolutely, one hundred percent honest about everything, she was pretty sure that that would be the emotional equivalent of a dam breaking. Messy, and unpredictable, and terrifying, and enough to drown anyone who was too close when it happened.

And she didn’t want you to drown.

She had read about _the mortifying ordeal of being known_ , once. She wasn’t sure where, but she agreed with whoever had came up with that one. Because really, it _was_ mortifying; there was just so much of her for anyone to know, and so much of it was _bad_ , and she wasn’t sure if you’d still want to stick around if you’d see her the way she saw herself. _All_ of her. The good and the bad. Mostly the bad.

She wouldn’t admit it in a million years, of course, but she was scared. 

So she kept you at a distance.

But this new version of her was also just so very, very soft around the edges. Maybe not physically, she was pretty sure that her bones were still pretty hard and jabby and angular, and she wasn’t _soft_ in the same way you (- _humans,_ she corrected herself - not just you, _humans_ ) were, but still. 

Maybe soft wasn’t the right word. Sometimes she felt _raw._

She couldn’t help but feel like sometimes her emotions were just spilling out of her even when she didn’t mean for them to. In every accidental micro-expression and too-honest smile, every time she caught herself speaking a bit more truthfully than she had intended. Every time she could feel herself being socially awkward and not quite knowing what to do about it, every time she said the wrong thing and only realized it a little too late, every time she didn’t quite know how to _be_ around you. 

( _Other people,_ she corrected herself. Not just you. _Other people)._ And then she caught herself thinking, _but do you really even count as ‘other people’?_ She wasn’t sure. But it felt suspiciously much like maybe she knew, but just didn’t especially like the answer. 

Because she wasn’t _supposed_ to feel like this. Not in general, not about humans, and especially not about you. 

But being around you made her feel like she didn’t want to run anymore, and that scared her. 

(Or maybe more specifically, something about you made her feel like she didn’t want to run from _you,_ and _that_ scared her. And it made her want to run more than ever). 

But she still couldn’t quite bring herself to keep her distance. 

Maybe she was just finally starting to get tired of all the pretending. Or maybe this version of her was just a bit lighter than the last one (-again, not just physically, but still). Maybe she was simply tired of being grumpy. Although she hadn’t _really_ been that grumpy before, either. Maybe she had just been tired. 

Whatever the case, the point still stands; she could feel herself slipping closer to you, she could feel her carefully curated mask cracking, and the worst part was that she wasn’t even sure anymore if that was such a bad thing. 

She was pretty sure you hadn’t noticed anything strange going on with her - after all, she was plenty strange to begin with. _(Add a drop to a lake, and what do you get? A lake)_. 

At this point though, she wasn’t sure if that made her feel relieved or disappointed. Maybe she was both - with a brain the size of hers, there should be enough space for two feelings at the same time. Or maybe that was her hearts - one feeling for each one. (She knew that wasn’t how it worked, really, but it was a nice thought, so she let herself think it). 

The Doctor had been observing you. Since that one very strange, very blurry night that she suspected might have been permanently etched into her brain ( _not that she was complaining_ ), she had been watching you more carefully. 

You didn’t seem to be acting strange around her. That was good. She was pretty sure that if _that dream_ had been yours, and not just hers, she would’ve probably picked up some kind of changes in your behavior. But no, whenever you were around her, your heartbeat was calm as ever, you didn’t seem to be blushing more than usual, you didn’t seem nervous, and really, nothing seemed to be wrong or out of the ordinary.

Well, except for the fact that _her_ body seemed to be showing all of these symptoms. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The next part will be happier, I promise. Our Timelord will not be sad & angsty forever, lads.


	7. The one where they talk

The Doctor had been meaning to check out lake Baikal for a while now. 

And she needed a distraction.

So this was as good a time as any, right? Impeccable logic. Soundproof. Watertight. Could not be argued. 

"Doctor. It's late. We've been running all day. Could we just, I don't know, stop for a second, catch our breath, and maybe leave that for tomorrow?" You were trying your best not to sound too annoyed, trailing after her as she circled the console.

"Come on! The deepest lake on this planet! Mysterious lights! UFO sightings! Strange stories from divers who go just a little too deep! Don't you want to know what's going on?" She was grinning, already flipping some switches and presumably punching in the coordinates for Russia. You could see her eyes sparkling with excitement. 

And you had to take a deep breath to remind yourself to _be sensible about this._

The part of you that was always looking for the next adventure wanted to just grin and take her hand and walk straight out of those doors and into whatever the universe was going to throw at you this time. And some other part of you that was much more concerned with things like, your general safety and physical well-being and other boring real-life things, wanted to just get a nice cup of tea and head straight to bed. You let out a breath. _Be sensible about this_. 

It felt like trying to talk a toddler out of eating all their candy at once. You weren't even entirely sure which one of you was the toddler in this scenario, you or the Doctor, but it felt like a good comparison nevertheless. 

Maybe you were the toddler and she was the one offering you all the candy in the world. That felt about right. 

“The place is over 30 _million_ years old! That’s almost as old as-” She cuts herself off and shakes her head a little, her face going still for just half a second. “There are things that live there that can’t be found anywhere else on Earth! There’s stories about a lake monster! Alien sightings! And really, really old trees!” Her eyes widen a bit mid-thought. “We could talk to the trees! Just _imagine_ everything they’ve seen! Oh, I hope they’re friendly ones.”

You took a breath, abandoning your argument for a moment and sidetracking out of curiosity. “Aren’t all trees friendly?”

She squints her eyes and tilts her head a little. “Mainly, yes. As long as you’re nice to them. Some of them are real grumpy, though - can’t really blame them, with all the chopping down and burning you lot are doing.” 

Then she grins. “So, what do you say? Want to meet some really old trees? Maybe run into a lake monster or two? Figure out why they tell cautionary tales of that place?”

You sighed a bit. 

"Yes, I do, but I also need to sleep for a bit every once in a while, you know. We could go first thing tomorrow, though."

She pouted, in a way that looked just slightly off on her. "Tomorrow might be too late! What if there's trouble? What if someone needs help? What if-" she stops on her tracks and points at you to emphasize "-the aliens leave and by tomorrow it's just gonna be a boring old lake?"

You take a breath and stare at her blankly. 

"Doctor."

"Yes?"

"We are in a literal time machine." You gave her a pointed look and she stared right back at you, as if you _hadn't_ just made her last argument completely invalid. But she was now trying to win with sheer willpower instead of any kind of logic, so that hadn’t really mattered, anyways. 

And then she licked her lips and trying out a new tactic, tilted her head and raised an eyebrow. "I bet it's something really cool. Bioluminescent aliens. People living under the lake. Mermaids. Bioluminescent mer-aliens living in the lake."

You let out a breath. Of course you were intrigued, but man, you just really needed to rest for a bit. You, unlike the Timelord, couldn't just keep running forever.

"Doctor, I get that you're exited and believe me, I want to check it out too, of _course_ I'm curious about what's going on. But in case you've forgotten, I'm _human_ , and I need more sleep than you do, as boring as that is. And if I don't sleep, I'm not going to be able to keep up with you." You tried to explain. 

You weren't entirely sure how much she had been paying attention to your human habits - it _was_ entirely possible that she just...forgot that you actually do need to sleep more than she did.

She looked a little disappointed, but didn't argue any further. She knew that was true - humans _did_ start getting a bit wobbly quite quickly if they didn't get enough sleep. In her opinion, that was quite the design flaw, but there wasn’t much she could do about it. Well, not ethically, anyways. 

And she didn't want you to feel anything less than optimal, running around sleep deprived was borderline dangerous if you happened to lead the kind of lifestyle they did, and logically, she knew that you were right, but-

"If you want, you could always just drop me off at my place for tonight, and hop straight to tomorrow morning." You suggested, despite not really liking the idea - her steering was often a little questionable, unpredictable at best. 

She frowned at the thought and looked you over. Sure, that would save her from the boredom of yet another pointless night of _not doing anything_ and just having to be alone with her thoughts, but she still liked having you there much more than she liked the idea of _not_ having you there. Even if you were asleep. 

Lately, the Doctor had started to realize the TARDIS felt uncomfortably _empty_ without you. 

So she takes a breath, lets the stubborness drain out of her, and leaves her excitement to simmer. "Okay. We'll go tomorrow." She says and gives you a small smile. Tilts her head a little. "Or, technically not tomorrow, but-"

She cuts herself off when you smile back at her softly, relaxing visibly at the promise of rest. Then she licks her lips and looks away, leaning to the console. 

The Doctor was trying to get herself to talk more. About her feelings. About the things that mattered. 

And this seemed as good of a time to start as any. 

That moment between deciding she should say something honest and actually saying it out loud made her feel like she was falling. Or possibly underwater. Or both. She could feel her heartbeats thrum away in her ears, and it was _annoying,_ and she could see all the ways this could end badly, and suddenly she couldn’t quite think straight.

The Doctor didn’t know what to say. 

"I'm sorry.” She starts. She felt like the moment between her last heartbeat and the next was stretching to be uncomfortably long.

 _Baby steps,_ she reminds herself, and lets out a breath, pretending that it helped her relax. 

“Sometimes I forget how much sleep you humans really need. But you're right. Can't have you be all sleep deprived and wonky when we're saving the world."

You lean to one of the softly glowing pillars and raise a brow a little. "So you're already planning on having to save the world tomorrow, then?"

She almost says ' _when aren't I_ ' or ' _yeah, that's my job_ ' or ' _the world does seem to be ending most days_ ', but all of those feel just a little bit too heavy.

"Seems to be a pattern. Always good to be prepared." She says instead, with her tone just a little too light and without quite meeting your eyes. 

She shoves her hands in her pockets, and gives you a small, painfully fake smile. "Go on. Sleep as long as you want to. I'll...figure out something." She gives you a small half shrug. "Maybe I'll have another crack at fixing the chameleon circuit. Or maybe I should reorganize the library - that might be good. Did you know there's a whole section that's organized by color, of all things? Bill did that one day, because she was _bored_ and thought it would _look cool_. The TARDIS liked it, didn't let me change it back, and now I can't find _anything_ in there anymore." 

Her smile turns a little more real and a lot more sad. 

It _did_ look cool. And she didn't _really_ want to change it back. She liked it quite a lot, in fact. This was just one of those things she said to fill a silence she couldn't quite decipher the meaning of. 

You smile at her softly. "Don't. I like it. Looks nice." 

She looks at you for a moment, her face unreadable. "Chameleon circuit it is, then." Then she leans off the console with a small twirl. "Do you want tea? Could help bring your adrenaline levels back down after everything that’s happened today. I've got this one really good tea from Kepler 7B, really relaxing, should calm you right back down. Plus it's good for your brain to just have something warm to hold." 

You were pretty sure she's gone back to her 'rambling to cover up something else' -mode, but you didn't really feel like poking your nose into it any further at the moment. So you just smile at her a bit.

"Sure. Tea sounds nice."

She grins at you and clasps her hands together, already on her way to the kitchen. “Tea it is! Tea is good, I like tea. Brilliant invention, tea. We should go thank whoever came up with it.”

You trail after her with a small smile on your lips. 

Two cups of tea and approximately one human sleep cycle later, the Doctor set the coordinates for lake Baikal, Russia, circa 2000-ish. 

They did not end up at lake Baikal. They did not end up anywhere near lake Baikal, or Russia, or the 2000′s.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Listen, lake Baikal is a real weird place and if you'd like to know more about the weird stuff the Doctor is exited about, I highly recommend listening to the What if podcast episode 138. It's on spotify


	8. The one where they get lost

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> May I offer you some dirt in these trying times?

So they did not end up at lake Baikal.

Instead, they found themselves in some quiet back alley in England, somewhere around the time of brightly colored dresses, neatly arranged pin curls, and cars that you had filed as 'vintage' in your head.

The Doctor pokes her tongue out of her mouth and tilts her head. And then after a moment, hums quietly to herself and shifts her weight from one side to the other. "Hm. Tastes like 1952. No, 53. Small traces of lead and rocket fuel in the air, and there's a potato farm about 5 kilometers that way. I think it's a Tuesday. And it's also about to rain."

You raise a brow a little, but by now know not to question any of that. 

The Doctor smiles at you brightly, seemingly not at all bothered by landing in the completely wrong place, and time. 

She had gotten pretty used to adding a mental _"or wherever we need to go"_ to the end of any of her navigation efforts, anyways.

The first thing she does, of course, is scan the area. For anything weird, or abnormal, dangerous, or possibly alien. 

"Higher levels of artron energy than there should be. And some definitely non-Earth metals. Hm. Almost looks like-" She furrows her brows a little. "There's a spaceship in orbit." She says, in a tone that one might say _'Oh, look, it's snowing'_ with. 

"What do you say? Should we go check it out?" She asked, glancing over at you. 

She had that look on her face, the one she got when she knew there was something _new_ and _strange_ and _possibly dangerous_ that she was just about to stumble face first into. And she grinned. 

It's infectious, her enthusiasm. So you smile back at her. "What kind of ship?"

She lifted the sonic screwdriver up to her face and studied the readings for a second. "Sontaran, it seems like."

"What are they here for?"

"What are they always here for?" She answers with a question, her tone dark, and it's a lot more grim than what you were hoping for.

_Of course. War._

You take a breath, and try to get your brain into problem solving mode. "How do we stop them?" 

"Ideally, as quickly as possible." She answers looking around the surroundings. "There are some funky readings a few blocks that way." She nods towards a busier street. "Probably a small squadron. We should go introduce ourselves before they send any more of those angry potatoes down here."

You nod, and head down the street after her.

The Doctor leads you down to a different but equally uninteresting back alley, keeping her eyes trained on a brick wall. There's a small frown on her face now, that exited grin long gone. 

"There's a perception filter on this wall. Someone doesn't want us noticing whatever's behind it." She says, squinting her eyes a bit.

"Right. How do we get through it?" You ask, blinking rapidly to try and force your eyes to stay on one spot.

She licks her lips. "There doesn't seem to be a door. You don't happen to have a battering ram handy, do you?" 

You tilt your head a little, briefly wondering if that was something she thought might have been an actual possibility. "No, but we could circle the building and try to find a different way in. Because unless the Sontarans have suddenly figured out dimensional engineering, whatever's behind that wall is inside that building, and most buildings do have doors." 

Her face lightens up a little. "You're right! Ten points for you."

And that's how you find yourself breaking into a run-down warehouse/alien base, by climbing through a window. The Doctor seemed to think this was all perfectly reasonable, because windows were completely functional access points, especially when someone _really_ doesn't want you walking in the front door. 

Stumbling into the floor, you took in the surroundings. The Doctor was already scanning the room with a concentrated look on her face and her shoulders squared in a _'I'm here to save this planet and you don't want to get in my way'_ -type of fashion. 

"No-one here yet, we must be early." She notes, relaxing a little. "Good."

Looking around the room, you noticed a lot of very alien-looking technology, and knowing who it belonged to, your brain immediately labeled is as 'I don't know what that is, but it's probably a weapon'. 

Before you could formulate any sort of plan on what to do about any of this, a group of four fully armed Sontarans teleport into the room. They immediately raised their weapons towards you, shouting something that sounded a lot like _"Intruders!"_ , but with their helmets you weren't quite sure.

The Doctor didn't even flinch. 

Instead, she was _alarmingly_ relaxed. 

"I'd suggest you get off this planet before anyone gets hurt." She says, completely ignoring the fact that there was a very large some-type-of-gun-thing aimed directly at her chest.

"Surrender!" One of the Sontarans, probably the leader, yelled.

You were just standing there, trying to calm your heartbeat down. Because as someone with healthy self-preservation instincts, the very large some-type-of-gun-thing aimed directly at _your_ chest, did register as a moderate to severe threat right now, despite how calm the Doctor seemed. 

"Nah, I don't think we will." The Doctor says, in a way more casual tone than someone in this type of situation should use, in your opinion. "Instead, why don't you take all this stuff with you, beam back to where you came from, and go have your battles in whichever tiny little deserted planet you like, as long as it's far away from this one."

"You will surrender!" The Sontaran yelled, completely ignoring that the Doctor seemed to be having an entirely different conversation than the one _they_ were trying to have.

The Doctor makes a face that's half annoyed and half confused. "I heard you the first time. And I'm telling you, we're not going to. Are you stupid or just not listening?" She furrows her brows a little. "What are you lot doing here, anyways? Earth isn't one of your enemies."

"The Earthlings have showed themselves capable for adequate warfare, and we shall now crush them in the glory of battle. Beginning with your surrender!"

"Ah. I was afraid you were going to say that. No thank you." 

"Then you will face execution!"

The Doctor tilts her head, as if considering this, and takes a step towards the Sontarans, just so conveniently placing herself between you and them. "Now _that_ you really shouldn't do. Trust me, you don't want to go there. I'm a bit explodey, me, whenever someone tries to kill me."

"Humans don't explode, they do not have a self destruction sequence, this is a commonly known fact!"

"Never heard of spontaneous human combustion, then?" You offer in a halfhearted attempt to buy some time for whatever the Doctor was planning. You _were_ hoping she was planning something. 

The Sontaran is silent. 

The Doctor nods a little. "See, I'm very difficult to kill. Might spontaneously combust and whatnot."

"Humans are very easy to kill, they have many known weaknesses!"

The Doctor smiles. "Ah. Yes. But the thing is, I'm not human. Sorry, probably should've lead with that." She scrunches up her face a little in some sort of mock-apologetic look. "You haven't scanned us yet, have you? Just for future reference, you probably should have. Always good to know who exactly you're waging a war against." Her voice turns darker towards the end of the sentence, and it almost makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. 

There's a beat of complete silence when one of them raises up a device you now assume to be some sort of a scanner. 

"Are you lot familiar with Strax, the nurse?" The Doctor asks them casually, not waiting for them to complete their scan.

"We do not speak of him." The leader finally says, in what you thought was a slightly bitter voice.

"You should. Do you know who made him a nurse?" She doesn't wait for them to answer, and instead raises her hand in a vague wave. "Hello. I'm the Doctor. And this is the part where you lot gather your gadgets and _really_ get off this planet before anyone gets hurt." 

Her voice is steely, and unwavering, and a lot colder than what you're used to.

The Sontarans don't stay long enough to answer, and instead teleport out of the room in silence.

The Doctor turns around to face you. "Are you alright?"

You tilt your head a little. "Didn't get shot. I'm okay."

She smiles, but it seems hollow. "Good. Now let's make sure they really get out of here. Come on." 

She shoves her hands in her pockets and walked towards an exit - a door, this time - and into the crowd. It's a relatively busy street, and you trail after her. 

She looks up. "They're still in orbit." 

It's more of an observation than anything else, but she starts heading back towards the TARDIS, so you're guessing she's going to do something about that. 

You're both walking quickly, navigating through the crowd of people who were going on about their lives, completely unaware that there was an alien war/invasion hanging over their heads. 

And then she sees a familiar face in the sea of people, and freezes for a second, before realizing that while Madge Arwell might look eerily similar to how she did about ten years ago, the Doctor, however, did not. 

But then again, she wouldn't put it past Madge to still somehow be able to recognize her, anyways. She seemed like the kind of person who could do that.

So the Doctor did the reasonable thing, and immediately turned on her heels and slipped out of the crowd. You almost slam into her. 

"Come on." She says, as if that explains the sudden change in course.

"What, are there more Sontarans coming?"

She kept walking, and shoved her hands in her pockets. "No." she said, and it sounded a lot like she wasn't planning on elaborating.

"Well, what is it? If it's not aliens, who are we running away from?"

She kept her eyes forward, and for a moment you weren’t sure if she was even going to respond. 

"Mum." She finally said, voice heavy, and this made you almost trip over your feet.

"What? _Your_ mum?" You ask, well aware that she had, on many occasions, told you she didn't really _have_ family anymore. The last of the Timelords, last of her species? Yeah, she had never mentioned having a mother who would just casually be hanging around on 1950′s Earth on a random Tuesday afternoon.

You could see her grit her teeth a little. "Not _my_ mum technically, no."

You furrowed your eyebrows. You weren't sure if that made the situation any less confusing.

"Why are we avoiding her, then?"

She keeps walking and stays quiet, and you could see all the emotions swirling behind her eyes, like a rain cloud hanging over her head. 

She looked like she was seconds away from either exploding or crumbling into pieces. 

You wished she would just talk to you, but she seemed to be intent on bottling up all of her emotions until the day she died. 

Her shoulders sag a little bit, but she doesn't respond. 

Then you reach your destination, and she stops on her tracks as she sees the familiar blue box again. 

She stares at the ship, and you’re pretty sure she has now completely dropped your earlier conversation. 

"You did this on purpose, didn't you?" She says quietly, glaring at the TARDIS, and it sounded more like an accusation than a question. 

The TARDIS makes a light whirring sound, and the Doctor squints her eyes at the box. She opens her mouth as if to say something, but then snaps it shut, huffs, and shoves her hands in her pockets.

A very strange, very intense Timelord-vs-timeship staring match goes on for a good while, and you begin to wonder if the Doctor is really communicating with the ship telepathically or if she's just too stubborn to quit staring first. Both seemed equally likely, at this point.

The TARDIS _thrums_ in a way that you could swear you felt in your bones, and then, slowly but surely, starts fading out of existence. 

The Doctor instantly springs to life and rushes towards the ship, making some vague, but frantic, hand gestures. "No, no, no, don't do that! This isn't an emergency, this is just a minor inconvenience! Just a small invasion! No big deal!" She groaned, digging around her pockets. "No! Come back!" 

She points the screwdriver in the general direction of where the TARDIS was now in process of phasing in and out of existence.

"Doctor? Why is-" You start to ask, even though you're like 99 percent sure it's not helping the situation at all. 

She made an almost offended-sounding groan when the ship faded out of sight one final time, completely. 

You tilted your head. "Doctor?" You ask, prompting her to explain what was going on. 

She just stares at the now empty spot of space. 

"Doctor. Why did the TARDIS just vanish?"

She swallows and licks her lips, doesn't move her eyes away. 

"Well. As you probably noticed, the exterior still looked like a phone box."

"Yes?"

"So I didn't fix the chameleon circuit last night." She explains, and you cross your arms, waiting for her to continue. 

"-I fixed the emergency relocation system." She finishes, sounding half guilty and half annoyed.

" _Fixed_." You echo, wondering if this really was what 'fixed' was supposed to look like. 

"Well, yes. It should allow the TARDIS to relocate away from immediate danger without a pilot, in case she ever fell into the wrong hands or I couldn't get back to her, or-" She trails off with a vague hand gesture. "Or something." 

The Doctor made a conscious effort to not finish the thought with _in case I ever need to send you away from danger._

"Which is why we're now, what? Stranded in the 50's?"

She shoves her hands in her pockets and glares at a nearby wall.

"Should re-materialize soon enough, once she realizes it's not an _actual_ emergency."

"Right. Just a small invasion. No big deal." You repeat her earlier words back to her.

She shoots you a look. "We've dealt with those before. This isn't the type of emergency she would need to relocate herself away from. Must be faulty, still. Unless-" She cuts herself off and squints her eyes at the place where the TARDIS had been in earlier.

"Unless...?"

She turns back to look at you. "Nevermind. Probably still just faulty. I'll sort it out once she comes back." She gives you a smile that's probably meant to be reassuring, but just mainly comes off as fake. 

And then it starts to rain like there's no tomorrow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you don’t remember who Madge Arwell is, you might want to rewatch The Doctor, the Widow, and the Wardrobe. You know, that one Christmas special with 11 and Madge and the kids and the snowy tree planet with the acid rain.


	9. The one where they get found

You shiver and wrap your arms around yourself, you know, like a reasonable person. The Doctor, however, doesn't seem to react to the rain at all, and instead just slowly sighs and pinches the bridge of her nose. 

At this point, she was fairly sure the TARDIS had done _all_ of this on purpose. Dropping you off in London, 1953, conveniently just so that you'd run into Madge, and then just bloody _taking off._

The Doctor takes a deep breath. She knows what she's _supposed_ to do now, she knows what she _should_ do now. 

The reasonable course of action would be to walk up to Madge Arwell and introduce herself, and ask if they could possibly stay at her place tonight, because her ship had decided to run off without her and she didn't want her human getting cold from being out in the rain. Yes, that's what she _should_ do.

"Come on. We could probably find a motel near here somewhere." She says, nodding towards the now much quieter street.

Most people had scurried inside as soon as it started raining, because unlike the two of you, they had somewhere to _go_. 

You tilt your head a little, a shiver running through your body as the cold water starts seeping through your clothes. "Do you have any money?"

She seems to be a little surprised at the question, but begins to walk out of the alley anyways. "No."

"Right. Neither do I. Any ideas on what to do about that, then?"

"We could always-" She digs around her pockets with a concentrated look on her face. "Right, no psychic paper, then. Nevermind."

You shiver again, and the Doctor feels physically bad for you. _She_ isn't as sensitive to temperature changes, this seemed to be something unique to humans and their inability to adapt their body heat to fit different temperatures. Another one of those design flaws, if you asked her. 

She's trying to figure out something to do, something that would get you _inside_ and _warm_ and _dry_ , preferably as soon as possible. Run into some little shop? That didn’t seem like a very long-lasting solution. 

She had a lot of useful things in her pockets - the current inventory being one sonic screwdriver, one banana, one hard drive with some texts from the library of Alexandria that she'd been meaning to transfer to the TARDIS database, a very handy assortment of screws and bolts and some duct tape, but no Earth London money from 1953. She briefly wondered if ATM's were a thing already, and if they were, if she could raid one. Or possibly rob a small bank. It was practically the same thing, wasn't it? 

And then a painfully familiar voice interrupts her train of thought. 

"Oi, you two, get in here!"

It's Madge Arwell. 

It takes the Doctor about half a second to recover from the initial shock, and somewhere in that process she registers that Madge is driving a _car_ , with a _roof_ , and it looks remarkably dry, and warm, and quite a lot like it's _going somewhere_ that's probably even _more_ dry and warm, and as much as the Doctor would've liked to avoid meeting her again after all those Christmas dinners she (he?) had missed, the fact that you looked absolutely miserable standing next to her shivering and soaked to the bone was enough to tip the scale over to _'Yes, of course, thank you.'_

"What are you doing out there in the rain! Haven't you heard there's about to be thunder as well? It's dangerous to stay outside in a thunderstorm! And you two are absolutely not dressed for the weather!"

 _Ah_ , you think to yourself. _This is why the Doctor had referred to this woman as 'Mum' earlier._

You smile, thank her, and climb into the car.

"Yes. Our...plans sort of fell through." The Doctor offers as a way of explanation. "We're just passing through, didn't really know where to go. The rain caught us by surprise."

That was a lie. She had known it was going to rain, she had just cataloged that fact somewhere to the back of her brain where it had settled in comfortably and become remarkably insignificant and boring. Besides, the Sontarans and their wars had been a definite curveball that she had _not_ been expecting when she set out to go meet some old trees and lake monsters this morning. 

In her defense, she had had a busy day and the weather forecast had not been the most pressing issue in her mind.

"Do you have a place to go?"

"No." You answer, the exact same time as the Doctor says "Yes."

Madge gives you a strange look. 

"You two sure about that?"

The Doctor takes a breath, but before she can launch into some elaborate lie about how you did, actually, have a place to stay, and there was nothing to worry about, you cut her off. "We did, but that didn't work out. We do _not_ , at the moment, have a place to stay tonight." 

"Well, you're welcome to stay at my place. My husband is out of town, and the kids have moved out already. Got the whole place all to myself."

"That's very kind of you." The Doctor notes, more sincerely than what she had been planning. 

"Well, you looked absolutely miserable. What was I supposed to do, just leave you out in the rain?" Then she smiles a little. "My husband says I have a knack for bringing home strays. I guess he's right."

The Doctor looks out of the window. "Well, it's a good knack. Helping those who have nowhere to go. You should definitely keep it."

They both smile to themselves in silence.

"My name's Madge, Madge Arwell. And what should I call you?" She glances over her shoulder.

"John Smith." The Doctor says.

She smiles and turns to look at the driver, who wasn't looking at the road at _all_ anymore. 

The Doctor does her best to not comment on her driving (which, she noted, _had_ improved over the years, so that was a definite silver lining on all this).

You introduce yourself as politely as you can, trying to steer the conversation away from things like names and gender and how the two might sometimes be connected.

The Doctor seems to realize the slight inconsistency in her lie, and she mentally shrugs and hopes that maybe it had sounded enough like Joan, or something. 

Madge smiles a little. "Nice to meet you two. I wish it had been under better circumstances, this weather is quite dreadful, really, I'm sorry you got caught up in it."

"Well, it's London, isn't this just sort of how it always is?" You try, aiming for some nice and harmless small talk.

"I suppose, yes, but a bit of sunshine would've still been nice, don't you think?"

You hum in acknowledgement, and silently hope that the Doctor won't launch into some extravagant explanation about how sunshine was really bad for some life forms, actually, and too much of it is even dangerous for humans, and really, some rain is absolutely vital for a functional biosphere.

She doesn't. The rest of the drive goes by in silence. 

Soon Madge steers the car into a driveway (successfully, the Doctor quietly thinks to herself, and marks that down as a small victory). 

"Right then, here we are." She says cheerily, stopping the car and turning to look at you. "I must say, I wasn't expecting company - I'm afraid the place is a bit of a mess at the moment."

"Believe me, as long as it's warm, dry, and has a roof over it I don't think that's going to be a problem for anyone here." You smile at her politely, hoping to ease her nerves a little. 

Besides, you were pretty sure that whatever her house turned out to be like it could not possibly be messier than the TARDIS sometimes was. 

Bringing you in her home, Madge Arwell had a two part plan: one, get you both a set of dry, warm clothes, and two, make tea. This would instantly make any situation a whole lot better, so it seemed like a foolproof plan to her, and she was quite proud of it. So after digging up some clothes for the two of you to borrow, she walked straight into the kitchen.

Tea was good. Especially when you were lost, or cold, or generally just a little miserable, or getting to know new people. When you've got tea there's things to hold and stir, and that makes all of those situations remarkably easier to deal with. So she made tea. 

And as the kettle boiled, she had time to think. 

Madge knew there was something strange about the woman the second she saw her.

She seemed to be snooping around the town in places people weren't usually allowed in, she talked in a funny way, and kept waving her arms around as she spoke, as if that would make people listen to her better. Maybe it did.

Mostly it was because of the coat, though. As someone who had spent several long nights repairing various socks, shirts, trousers and jackets, she had an eye for these kinds of things. That jacket was strange and the color was odd and the fabric seemed weird and _why on Earth is it lined with rainbows_? And if someone could point her to a sewing machine that was able to do stitches that small without snatching the fabric, she would like to know where it was and if she could borrow it.

Now, she wasn't dumb. 

And due to some previous life experiences, she knew that there was at least one person in the universe who had been messing around with space/time travel. And as it happens, this person too, had a very peculiar way of dressing, speaking, and just generally, being. 

And the strange woman, with her strange coat and her strange words and her strange, restless energy, just as it happens, had introduced herself as _John Smith_ , too. 

So now she was just curious. 

Sure, maybe she had misheard that and the woman had, in fact, introduced herself as _Joan_ , but still. The fact still stands that the situation in itself seemed a little weird and the similarities with this woman and the man who she had once called Caretaker were remarkable. Give or take a few small details.

And ever since Cyril got into university he'd been hanging around _other_ kids who like to endlessly stare at the night sky every chance they get, and every once in a while Madge would get an exited call about _something strange_. One of these calls had been only a few days ago. 

And according to all supporting evidence that Madge had, there seemed to be a pattern between where strange things happened and where the Caretaker turned up. 

When the tea is ready, she pours it into three slightly mismatching floral porcelain cups.

You two join her in the kitchen, now in borrowed clothes that were _remarkably_ warm and dry, if slightly ill-fitting and strange. Madge seemed to be an avid knitter, and had more than enough handmade wool sweaters to choose from, and at the moment, that was the highlight of your day so far.

(Seeing the Doctor in one of these sweaters was a close second).

"Lovely! I made tea to help warm you two up, do you want milk, or sugar? Honey?" She asks cheerily, smiling at you.

"Tea! Brilliant, I love tea!" The Doctor ( _Joan_ , you mentally correct yourself) starts, walking towards the kitchen table. "Thank you, Madge, this is all quite wonderful. Very kind of you."

Madge smiles as she pulls out a jar of honey and starts spooning it into her own cup. "Just trying to help." 

You sit down and wrap your hands around the teacup, relishing in the warmth of it. 

Her house was very _homey_ , you noted quietly, and she seemed like a nice person. It was relatively easy to fall into some quite comfortable small talk, even though you were practically strangers.

The Doctor ( _Joan_ ) is adding spoonfuls and spoonfuls of sugar into her own cup, so much so that you start to wonder if it's going to start spilling over soon. 

You were beginning to understand why the Doctor had described this woman as _Mum_ earlier even if she wasn't _her_ mum, specifically. She had something very inherently _mother_ about her, and seemed to be very good at that thing that mothers were often especially good at; asking questions, and then being uncomfortably silent in a way that made you talk just to fill the silence. 

"Where _did_ you get that coat of yours? It's very strange."

"A shop."

"Which one?"

"Just a shop. You wouldn't know it. It's in Yorkshire."

She sips her tea. "And where are you two from, again? Not from around here, are you? Traveling, you said?"

The Doctor is silent for a beat.

"Yorkshire?"

"That sounded more like a question than an answer, dear. Are you sure?" She said in a very candidly pleasant, if slightly teasing voice.

Madge had called the Doctor _dear_ , and she didn't even flinch. You filed this under 'things to mark down for later' in your head, and continued to watch their intense yet somehow extremely casual conversation from the sidelines, quietly sipping your tea. 

"Sort of just travel a lot, I suppose." She shrugged a little. "Makes that a considerably more difficult question to answer. Makes you wonder where _home_ really is, you know?"

Madge hums in agreement. And for a moment, you think you caught her eyes shifting to you. Just for a second. 

"And what are you two doing here, then? Not exactly a tourist attraction, this place. Just snooping around?"

"Just passing through. And we weren't _snooping around_ , we were just-" She makes a small, frustrated huffing sound and a vague hand gesture, and slumps in her seat a little bit, clearly a little annoyed at being called out. "Just making sure that everything's okay, that's all."

"Still taking care of things, then?"

The Doctor stills in her absent-minded tea stirring, licks her lips and lifts an eyebrow carefully, in a way that seemed just a little bit too calculated.

"What do you mean?"

Madge just smiled. "Oh, you know. Taking care of things, helping people who need help, giving out multidimensional boxes as Christmas presents..." she explains, in a voice that sounded just a bit too casual for those words.

"It wasn't a multidimensional box- _oh_." Her brain catches up with her mouth, and the Doctor stops herself in the middle of the sentence, furrowing her eyebrows, and you're not sure how it's possible but she seems to both stiffen and relax at the same time. 

"How did you recognize me? I'm pretty sure I don't look quite the same anymore."

"I noticed. A trip to the hair salon?" She says, her tone light and with a small smile on her lips.

You smile at the exchange, and the Doctor doesn't quite seem to know what to say. This was quite unusual, and even if you didn't know Madge very well, you decided that you liked her.

"I gotta say, you should touch up your roots, dear." She continues, completely unbothered, smiling and with her eyes sparkling a little.

Then she changes to a much more serious demeanor, leaning back in her chair a little. "We missed you, you know. You could've stopped by - you still have that standing invitation to Christmas dinner, by the way - or you could have called or sent a postcard or something. Cyril kept asking about you and your spaceship, do you know what I went through to try and figure out an answer for him?"

The Doctor glances down. She isn't used to her past catching up with her. 

Though maybe she should learn. 

"I'm sorry. I meant to call. I've been busy."

Madge smiles at her, all sparkling eyes and motherly warmth. "I can imagine. Look at you now - one day in this town and there's already an alien invasion!"

"The invasion was here first! Not the other way around." She tries to defend herself half-heartedly, but her voice is just a hint lighter now. Just a touch more _real._ She seems to have relaxed a little, and even if you don't fully understand what's going on that still seems like it's probably a good thing. "And how do you even know about that?"

"Cyril's been watching the skies. Said there was something up there."

"Ah. Figures. Smart kid." The Doctor smiles a little. "Don't worry, we've mostly sorted it out." 

"So, still taking care of things then, I see. Have you gotten any better at it?" She smiles, then turns to look at you, not waiting for the Doctor's response. "Good to see you're not traveling alone anymore, though." She said softly, her eyes warm and with a small smile on her lips.

"Where's the rest of your things? You had a box last time."

There's a quiet beat as neither of you quite know how to answer that. 

"Should materialize sooner or later, if all goes to plan." The Doctor finally offers. 

Madge raises an eyebrow. "Lost it in the time vortex?"

The Doctor opens her mouth to answer, but it takes a few seconds for her to get the words out. "Not lost. I just....don't exactly know where it is, at the moment."

"Sounds quite much like the definition of lost, dear." Madge smiles, and even though her words sound teasing they don't feel harsh. 

"Well, feel free to borrow anything you need." She gestures around the room, then turns to look at you. "I figure I owe you that much. She saved my husband, did she ever tell you about that? Took my children to an alien planet without permission and almost got us all melted with acid rain, but saved my husband in the process."

You raise a brow a little and tilt your head, curious about the story.

"You saved him all by yourself, Madge." The Doctor says with her voice surprisingly soft, and there's a tinge of something warm in her eyes. "You're the one who flew the ship."

"Well, that's true, but if you hadn't been there I would never have done any of that, so it counts." She then smirks a little. "Besides, you were a man at the time. Couldn't have piloted the ship if you tried to, I'd imagine."

The Doctor frowns at this a bit. "I _did_ try to. And I would've figured something out eventually, you know. I always do."

Madge smiles a little. "I know." She says, in a way that makes it sound like she maybe doesn't believe that at all. "Well, it all turned out alright in the end." 

"Yes, I suppose it did."

They both smile in that way that old friends tend to smile to each other when reunited after a long time.

Madge finishes her tea. "Well, you can stay here as long as you like.” She nods to herself. “You can sleep in the guest room. Make yourselves at home."

 _Guest room. Singular_ , you think to yourself, and then quietly add: _How much do you want to bet there's going to be only one bed?_


	10. The one where the Doctor fixes things

The weather in London changes quickly. 

The thunder passes over them steadily and without causing too much trouble, and soon the skies are calm again and back to their usual default grey. 

They talk about anything and everything, go over some pictures of Lily and Cyril growing up, and listen to some radio show Madge was very fond of, while the Doctor was doing her best to sit still.

(She wasn't very good at that, and she needed something to _do_ , and she briefly wondered if Madge would let her take the radio apart and then put it back together, maybe giving it a little upgrade in the process. Somehow she felt like that wouldn't get a very positive response, however, so she stayed silent). 

The Doctor was sitting cross-legged in an armchair, with her gaze wandering around the room. Picking up on her restless energy, you felt a little bad for her. Noticing a Rubik’s cube in a far corner of a bookshelf, you pick it up quietly, twist it around a few times for good measure, and pass it over to her silently.

Her eyes slightly light up at this, and you can see a small smile tugging at the corners of her lips. She doesn’t say anything, but takes the cube and instantly starts inspecting it, her shoulders relaxing visibly. 

She’s still listening to the radio show and Madge’s explanation of what’s going on, maybe even more so than before, now that she had something to occupy her never-settling mind and restless hands with.

It takes her all of two minutes to figure out what she’s supposed to do with the cube, and then solve it. 

Madge glances over at her.

"Now that you're here, Caretaker, do you mind taking a look at our car? It's making this terrible sound that I'm quite certain it should not be making, every once in a while."

The Doctor tilts her head a little and licks her lips quickly. "Have you hit something?" She asks, a little suspicious of the root cause of this problem.

"No, it just started doing that on its own."

Then the Doctor smiles faintly, happy about the new distraction. "I suppose I could take a look. Cars from around this time are quite simple, shouldn't take long to figure out."

Madge absolutely beams at her. "Brilliant!" 

You stay inside, inspecting the bookshelf and still half listening to the radio, while Madge and the Doctor go to the garage. You were comfortable enough in the warmth of the house, thank you, and some of the books on the shelf _did_ look pretty interesting. There were some remarkably new-looking classics that you had always been meaning to read, but had never gotten around to actually reading. 

In the dim-lit garage, after some questions about the nature of this 'no-good godawful sound', the Doctor rolls up her sleeves, gets down on the ground, and wriggles herself under the car.

As the Doctor is laying there, partially beneath the car now and trying to think through everything she knows about what cars from around this time are _supposed_ to look like, Madge keeps talking in a cheery voice from her spot on the ground.

"So what have you been up to, since we last saw you?"

"Oh, you know. Same old. Traveling, helping out. Saved some dinosaurs, and some planets, taught physics for a bunch of college kids for a bit. Lived in a town called Christmas for a while, got trapped in a house that tried to eat some of my friends, got drowned as a witch, saved a sentient pocket universe that looked like a frog, and met some very nice people." The Doctor rambles off the top of her head. 

"Like her?"

She's silent for a bit, and pretends it's because she's still trying to make sense of the mess on the underside of the car. 

(She knows exactly what's wrong with the car, she's known for a while now, but at the moment she doesn't really feel like dragging herself out from under there where she was still safely out of sight and didn't have to look Madge in the eyes. She always did have very knowing eyes, and the Doctor has a hunch of where this conversation is going.)

"Yes."

"So you two are together, then? She travels with you, I mean?"

The Doctor is almost certain that that isn't what Madge means, but she goes along with it anyways.

"Yes. She travels with me." She says after a beat, and then, just for good measure, adds, "We're friends."

 _Friends_ didn’t seem like a big enough word, not even close, but she didn’t really know how to add weight to it, make it seem more important, without making things weird, so she settled for it anyway.

"That's good. You shouldn't be alone. It's not good for you."

There's a silence when the Doctor doesn't know what to say to that, and she tries to preoccupy herself by unscrewing the remarkably rusted bolts that were holding up an almost equally rusted exhaust pipe.

Madge doesn't drop the subject. Just like the Doctor thought she probably wouldn't. 

"She likes you too, you know."

The Doctor doesn't answer. Instead, she flinches so hard she ends up banging her head to the bottom of the car.

"You should tell her how you feel." Madge continues, completely ignoring the fact that the Doctor hadn't answered and was now instead cursing silently under her breath beneath the car, with words that Madge couldn’t quite comprehend.

"I don't know what you're talking about." The Doctor says, and it sounds very unconvincing even to her own ears. She pretends that it’s true, anyways.

"I can tell it's bothering you."

"I'm fine."

"You're clearly not."

"I am." She keeps arguing, loosening the screws and using entirely too much force on it. 

Flakes of rust float down to her face, and as unpleasant as that is, it's a welcome distraction. 

She likes cars from around this time. Things are just bolted together, and when the parts get worn out or rusted, you can just take them out and replace them. No fuss. These kinds of parts weren’t easy to break, and if something didn’t fit, she could just hit it with a hammer until it did. 

Newer cars are more complicated - basically computers on wheels. Not that she didn’t like computers, but there was something very appealing with machines that were just sturdy and simple enough to fix with just a screwdriver.

"You like her, she likes you. And yet you both seem to be doing your best to try and pretend that's not the case. What's the problem here, exactly? Are you just that intent on being lonely and miserable?"

The Doctor takes a moment to steel herself, trying to come to terms with the fact that this is apparently now a conversation that she can't avoid. 

"It's not that simple."

"And why's that?" 

She couldn't see Madge, but could well imagine she was putting her hands on her hips right about now. 

The Doctor closes her eyes, and for half a second, focuses on the blood rushing in her ears. Talking about this somehow made the issue seem more _real_ , and she didn't really want to go there, because as long as she didn't say it out loud she still had the opportunity to fall back on some grey area where she could still pretend you were just friends and her feelings _weren't_ all over the place and everything was _normal_ and the inevitable future wasn't set in stone yet. 

She would take the grey area of ordinary happiness and undefined friendship-and-then-some over heartbreak, any day. The sharing of soft touches and personal space, the smiles, the unspoken understanding, that warm calmness she got in her hearts whenever you were around. 

Sure, she knew there could be _so much more_ than that, but that would mean messing with the delicate balance of how things were now. It would be scary, and new, and it felt like gambling with her eyes closed. 

And she knew how it would end.

"I'm not _human_ , Madge." She finally says, voice quiet and just a little bit broken, hoping that this would be enough of an explanation.

Madge is silent for a beat, before audibly letting out a breath.

"You're an idiot, that's what you are." 

"It's not- I can't -" She lets out a small groan. She doesn't quite know what she's trying to say, she doesn't know how to put her feelings into words. Doesn't know how to tell Madge that it would just be too weird and complicated and scary and _wrong_.

"It wouldn't work." Is what comes out of her mouth, in a quiet, defeated voice. "It could never work."

"Can you see the future?" Madge asks, and the Doctor isn't sure why but somehow it feels like a trap.

"...No?" She answers, quite certain that she was now walking directly into said trap.

"So, what? You're just going to wallow in your misery? You're not going to even try? Are you really just going to keep pretending that everything's okay and you're totally fine with the situation as it is even though you keep looking at her like...like a color you've never seen before?" 

The Doctor doesn't answer. Her head is swarming with objections, with reasons why that is _exactly_ what she's going to do and why even suggesting otherwise would be completely ridiculous, but for some reason she can't wrangle any of those thoughts into coherent words. 

"The heat cover of the exhaust pipe is rusted loose. It's nothing dangerous, I'll just replace the bolts and it should be fine." She says.

"Caretaker." Madge's voice is much softer now. "Are you really not going to give yourself the chance of being happy now just because you might be sad later?" She says, and the words settle into the Doctor's hearts, warm.

A sliver of hope. 

"Now, you don't need me to tell you how ridiculous that is, do you?" Madge continues. 

She lets out a breath, and some of the tension at the base of her skull fades away. 

Maybe, if Madge was right, there was a chance that you would think that too. That maybe the temporary happiness might still be worth the inevitable pain in the long run. 

She didn't really dare to let herself believe that, of course, but maybe there was a chance that _you_ would. 

And maybe that would be enough for her to believe it too.

And, if we're being honest here, so far it did seem like maybe that kind of happiness would be worth all the pain in the world. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't worry, we'll get to the bed sharing in the next part.  
> Also, did I bring Madge into this for the sole purpose of having her say That to the Doctor? Yes, yes I did.


	11. The one where there's only one bed

Walking into the guest room, the Doctor makes a point of _not_ looking at the only bed in the room. Instead, she walks straight to the small table, and starts piling things on it. Everything she had pulled out of her pockets earlier, before the change of clothes, quietly remarking that the sonic screwdriver hadn't gotten wet. That was good - it was always a hassle drying it. Always made the telepathic circuitry and the electric currents a little bit wonky. 

" _Please_ tell me you're not about to rewire the electrics in this room right now."

She licks her lips. "Wasn't going to." She says, you know, like a liar.

You raise an eyebrow at her. 

"Fine, maybe a little. Could use some work. I bet I could double the lifetime of these light bulbs."

You take a breath, lean to the wall, and look her over.

The Doctor looked like she was vibrating with restless, nervous energy, like someone who had had entirely too much coffee and not nearly enough sleep. She looked tired, and even though she was covering it up pretty well with the hyperactive facade, she looked like she was close a total collapse of some sort. Or possibly explosion. Or a nervous breakdown, maybe. 

Well, closer than usual, anyways. 

"Doctor, when was the last time you slept?"

She shoves her hands in her pockets -which, she notices, are remarkably smaller on the inside than what she's used to - and shifts her weight from one side to the other. 

"Recently."

"How recently?"

_I don't know, how long has it been since we last shared a bed?_

She doesn't answer.

"Doctor, when was the last time you actually, properly slept? And I don't mean any 'I'm shutting off my synapses for half a millisecond whenever someone boring starts talking' -Timelord nonsense, I mean a good, honest, full night's sleep."

She glances at the floor. "Don't worry about it." 

"I'll worry about it just as much as I like, thank you." You cross your arms, then let out a breath. "Doctor, you _need_ to sleep. I know it's not as much as I do, but-”

"No I don't." She lies.

You give her what you hope is a stern look. 

"Don't worry about it." She repeats, shifting her attention back to the objects scattered on the table and pretending to sort them out to some arbitrary order.

"Do you really think I haven't noticed you've been a little off lately?" You ask, a little cautiously. It felt a little bit like playing with fire - sure, she was your friend, your best friend, probably, but she was also the person who could turn around entire armies with just one look or the mere mention of her name. Poking at something she clearly didn't want to talk about? Yeah, a bit like playing with fire. 

She doesn't answer, but you can see her tense a little.

You continue poking. "You haven't been sleeping, you're constantly _doing_ stuff, running from one adventure to another, keeping yourself busy, never stopping, never staying still. That can't be good for you."

She's silent for a beat.

Apparently this was the day. The day the universe had decided that it was time for her to have all the conversations she'd been trying to avoid, whether she liked it or not.

"Did I mention the shark thing?" She tries, not meeting your eyes, and her voice a little higher than usual.

"Yes, and I don't believe you. Everything needs to sleep. Even sharks."

She takes a deep breath.

Going through the options in her head, she let her hands settle on the table. 

One, she could keep insisting that she didn't need to sleep, maybe back it up with some fun facts about all the things in the universe that _didn't_ actually need to sleep. Sit at the table all night, possibly rewiring the radio or something, building some sort of a transmitter to get a message across to the Sontarans even with the TARDIS gone. But that seemed like it would probably upset you, so it didn't seem like a very good option. 

Two, she could give in, climb into bed next to you and pretend that it didn't make her feel like her every nerve ending was on fire. 

Maybe she could pretend to sleep. Slow down her heartbeats a little and calm down her breathing. Maybe give astral projecting a try. That had always seemed interesting.   
That would stop you from worrying about her, right?

(There _was_ also the third option that she could always tell you _why_ exactly she hadn't been sleeping, but she didn't really let herself think that through. Not right now, not right here. Not when the TARDIS was gone, not while they were refugees in Madge's house for the next forseeable future, and not while she still felt like her hearts might bleed right out of her chest if she tried. So this wasn't _really_ an option. Sure, her little talk with Madge earlier _had_ made her feel a little more comfortable with the idea, but she wasn't _ready_ for that yet.)

The Doctor lets out a breath and tries to school her face into a somewhat calm expression. "Fine."

She looked over at the bed, tilted her head, crossed her arms, and tried to calculate how far apart you two could sleep (or, sleep and pretend-sleep) without either one of you falling off. 

_(The answer was: Not very)._

You smile at her a little. "Come on. It's not weird unless you make it weird."

_Exactly._

_You have no idea how correct that is,_ the Doctor thinks with heavy hearts.

She breathes out and lets her shoulders relax, trying her best to make it look natural. 

And after peeling off the sweater and changing into some Madge-assigned pajamas (that she didn't really see the point of, to her it seemed like just a whole different outfit for not being awake in and that was just kind of pointless when you think about it, but the fabric was soft and seemed warm and so she changed into it anyways, partially out of courtesy to the little human habits and partially so she'd have something to _do_ ).

And then, very carefully, the Doctor settled into the bed.

And some small part of her that was selfish and entirely too human, liked it.

She did her best to try and ignore the warm, comfortable feeling that was slowly creeping into her chest, but the longer she laid there the more it seemed to take root in her hearts. 

She tried to keep her mind occupied. 

She counted the planks in the ceiling and tried to find patterns in the wood (after all, there _had_ been that one incident with the faces in the floorboards), sorted out a universal version of Schrödinger's equation and made a mental note to introduce it somewhere around the 22nd century, and thought over just about every single possible negative scenario she was avoiding by _not_ falling asleep.

And when you're a near immortal _(still debatable in her head)_ being who could see in four dimensions and had lived for as long as she had, there was a _lot_. 

But the sound of heavy rain on a tin roof is very relaxing, and it drapes over her like a blanket in the dark, and she can hear your steady breathing giving rhythm to the time that's passing over the room like a wave in the ocean, and her mind starts to wander closer and closer to the edge of sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're getting somewhere, lads. Buckle up.


	12. The one where they talk (for real this time)

You were laying in the dark, drifting aimlessly on the grey area between awake and asleep. 

The house sounds different than what you’re used to - mainly, the ever-present hum of TARDIS engines is remarkably absent, and you’re not sure how, but apparently there is such a thing as _too_ quiet when you’re trying to sleep. 

To add to the strangeness, you think you can almost hear how unnaturally still the Doctor is. Or, more accurately, you _couldn't_ hear it, which meant that she wasn't shifting around, wasn't tracing her fingers along some imaginary patterns in the sheets or tapping out some secret rhythm, wasn't even breathing deep enough for the covers to move. 

You might have thought that maybe she's not there at all anymore, if it weren’t for the fact that you could still see her outline in the dark, and every once in a while you could hear her muttering something quietly to herself, or let out a sharp breath, or take a deep, shuddering inhale before going quiet again. No, she was there, she just wasn’t _there_. 

You could sense that she was tense. Like she was bracing herself for impact. Of what, you weren't sure, but you knew you didn't like it.

Even when the Doctor was quiet, or still, or sleeping, she was never like _this._

Usually she was always in motion, so fluid, so _alive_ , and even though you couldn't really see her now you knew she wasn’t moving, and you were pretty sure that if a river suddenly stopped flowing it would probably have about the same effect.

And maybe you weren't really making the most coherent observations about anything that was happening around you right now, but at the moment, her stillness was enough to worry you. 

You had _thought_ that getting her into the environment of sleep would be enough to get her to you know, actually _sleep,_ but apparently not, then.

So you take a deep breath and drag yourself back over to being mostly awake again. 

"You're like, radiating anxiety right now." You mumble quietly.

"No I'm not." She protests, voice tense.

"Yes, you are. What's going on?"

She's silent for a long beat.

"I'm just worried about the Sontarans." She lies.

"I thought you said it was just a small inconvenience." You say, half question and half observation. "It's not like this is much different from literally any other day for us, really."

"I just don't want them to drag the Earth into some intergalactic war. That's all."

"We'll sort it out tomorrow." You try to reassure her, despite not having anything even close to any sort of plan.

"Hm."

She doesn't seem to relax at all, and after what seems like a few minutes of silence, you shift in your place a little and turn to face her better.

She's staring at the ceiling, quiet.

"Is there anything I can do to help?"

_Suddenly become immune to my telepathic tendencies?_

"No."

You take a deep breath and study her features for a bit. "Doctor, please tell me what's going on in that big brain of yours. What's wrong?"

She stays silent.

"I know I might not be able to help, but talking about things usually helps anyways, you know. It helps you sort out your thoughts. You know, like that rubber duck thing."

The Doctor shifts in the dark, her brows furrowed. "Rubber duck thing?"

"Yeah, it’s a trick some programmers use. I heard Google has a rubber duck in their office, and whenever someone’s having problems with like, coding or something, they'd take the rubber duck and explain their whole process to the duck, in detail. That way you have to lay out your work logically, piece by piece, and you'll be able to see your problems form a different angle, you know?" You shrug a little, even though she can't probably see it.

The Doctor takes a moment to consider this.

"I could be your rubber duck, if you want." You offer quietly when she doesn't respond. It sounds pretty ridiculous the moment the words come out of your mouth, but in your defense, it was late, you were tired, and you weren't exactly proofreading your thoughts right now before saying them out loud. 

She hums quietly in response, turning the idea over in her head. 

The darkness around her felt safe, and warm, and kind, and the more she thinks about it the more she starts to feel like this might be a good time for taking the next baby step towards being honest.

So she takes a deep breath and tries to fix her eyes on a made-up pattern in the ceiling.

"Do you remember what happened? Last time we...did this?" She makes a vague hand gesture between the two of you, and even though you can't really see it in the dark, the meaning carries over anyways.

"You woke me up in the middle of the night to rant about how quantum physics shouldn't be allowed to be how it is and we should go have a ' _talk_ ' with whoever came up with it?" You say, almost certain that that's not actually what she's talking about, but going for it anyway. "You were mad that you can't perform quantum tunneling, and wanted to know who gave electrons permission to 'be like that', because you don't like it."

Were you surprised that the Doctor, when drunk, had wanted to fight God, or whichever entity was responsible for the laws of quantum physics, if there was one? No, not even remotely, really. This did, however, register in your head as the most memorable thing that had happened that night.

Well, right after the cuddling.

She mentally winces at the memory a little. "Yeah, sorry about that. But no, that's not what I mean."

You shift in your place a little, turn to get a better look at her. She's laying unnaturally still, on her back, in a way that didn't look comfortable at all.

She takes a breath.

"Do you remember anything else that was weird about that night?" She asks quietly after a moment, tentatively. "You know, besides my weird drunken ramblings."

You try to go over your memories of the night, but as expected, her weird drunken ramblings are what primarily comes to mind. 

"No, why?"

She grits her teeth a little. This _did_ make her feel a little better about the whole thing - increasing the chances that maybe the whole dream ordeal had just been in her head, and _only_ in her head.

But she couldn't really let herself relax until she was sure, and besides, now that she had started this conversation, she kind of felt like she needed to finish it, too.

Talking about difficult things, she finds, is quite a lot easier in dark hazy rooms in the middle of the night, when you were totally cut off from the rest of the world and it felt like you were frozen in time.

The white noise of the rain hammering steadily on the roof filled the silence that might have been uncomfortable in a conversation like this otherwise. Now the sound draped over her like a blanket in the darkness, and she briefly wondered if it was possible that this was actually some sort of a liminal space where time really did move differently from the rest of the world.

She shifted a little, burying herself deeper under the blankets and letting some of the tension fade out of her muscles. 

Tired, and warm, and more or less comfortable, she felt like she could relax more than she ever dared to do in daylight. It was dark enough for you to not be able to properly see her face, but still know where she was, and it was just that kind of quiet that made it feel like maybe this night would last forever. 

Like maybe conversations she had in here didn't really exist outside of this moment, and therefore, couldn't hurt her. 

She lets out a breath, and tries to let the nervousness bleed out of her.

"You know how I have some, hm, telepathic abilities?"

You nod, and she can't quite see it, but she can hear the motion, and that's enough.

She tries her best to ignore the closeness that that must imply. 

(With questionable success).

She takes a deep breath. 

"I'm worried I might have accidentally, uh, watched and/or influenced your dreams that night. Maybe. I'm not sure. My own memories are a bit fuzzy, you know, but, uh-" She blurts out, nervously, and she can feel the heat tingle up her cheeks. 

Saying it out loud feels both like a relief and like a blind jump off some metaphorical ledge. 

You feel like your heart maybe pauses for a little too long between this heartbeat and the next. 

" _That's_ why you haven't been sleeping?"

The Doctor swallows, and she's not sure why, but somehow the fact that you seem to be worried about her rather than being mad at her makes her feel worse.

"I was worried it might happen again." She explains quietly, avoiding your gaze, even though she was pretty sure you wouldn't have been able to see her eyes in the dark either way.

You furrow your brows a little. "But you're not sure if it even happened for real in the first place?" 

"That's not the point. The point is that it _might_ have happened. _Could_ have happened. In some version of reality, it did."

You take a breath, trying to push your own feelings to the background and figure out the best way to help her.

If she was _finally_ opening up, you wanted to be there for her the best you could. "If you didn't do it on purpose, why would it happen again?"

Her brain helpfully supplies the correct response instantly:

_Because I liked it._

She's not sure if she can say that out loud. 

So she stays quiet. 

"What happened in the dream?" You ask after a moment, trying out a different kind of approach.

She turns to look in the general direction of your face, just being able to make out the outline of messy hair, a calm expression, and not much else.

"Why does that matter?"

You shrug a little, but under the covers it doesn't have much effect. "I mean, you don't know what my dreams are usually like, right? If you tell me what you remember, I might be able to tell if I’ve had that dream or not." 

She blinks a few times as the suggestion sinks in.

You were right. She didn’t necessarily _like_ it _,_ but you _were_ right.

"Uh." She says.

"Well." She licks her lips, not quite knowing if she should tell you, and if she should, _how_ she should do it.

So, in true Doctor-esque manner, she decides to just start talking and hopes that it will lead to some non-negative results. 

"Well. We were sleeping next to each other. Together. Well, not sleeping. But you know. In a bed, sleeping together. In a remarkably less platonic way than what was really going on. Did you know that the term 'platonic' really is about Plato, the famous philosopher? Can you imagine doing something, or, well, _not_ doing something I guess, so much that your name becomes an adjective?"

You brain short-circuits somewhere around 'sleeping together' and therefore, you don't hear the rest of the sentence well enough to comprehend _anything_ about Plato, the famous philosopher.

Yeah, you were pretty sure you'd remember if you'd had a dream like _that_.

_You'd like to, anyways._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's getting real, babes.


	13. The one where she lets herself feel things

Suddenly you're way too aware of everything. The darkness, the silence, the bed that wasn't so much uncomfortable as it was just _unfamiliar_ , and the way you could feel your heartbeat thrum away in your ears. You're completely awake again, and with your mind racing.

"Oh." You breathe out, not really knowing what to say. What could you _possibly_ say to that?

Now your brain was, unhelpfully, presenting you with _all kinds of_ thoughts that made your cheeks feel warm, and suddenly you were thankful of the darkness surrounding you.

Not that you hadn't had those kinds of thoughts about her before, but this was _different_. Now you were laying next to the Doctor in a small, dark room, so close that you could literally hear her breathing, and she was _right there_ , and she had just -

Well. It seemed like she'd been thinking those kinds of thoughts too, and that _really_ didn't make it any easier for you to drag your mind out of the gutter.

You take a breath.

"Um." You say. "Okay."

You search her features for a moment, trying to get your thoughts in order, and lick your lips instinctively. "Yeah, uh, I don't remember having a dream like...that." 

She shifts a little in her place and turns to face you. 

She seems to relax a little, if the deep breath she lets out is any indication. You can just about make out her eyes in the darkness, or at least you think you can, almost.

"Oh." She says, sounding a little surprised. Her voice is a weird mix of relief and disappointment, and you're not quite sure what to make of that, so you brush it off as your tired brain not knowing how to handle social cues correctly anymore.

"Must have been just in my head, then." She continues. "Good."

You hum quietly as some sort of a half-response.

"I mean-" She rushes to continue, tone urgent. "I'm glad I didn't accidentally sneak around in your head when you were asleep. That would've been rude. And bad."

You take a breath and try to focus on the real situation here, instead of the extremely unhelpful mental images that your no-good traitor brain was stubbornly clinging onto.

"You know, we could've had this conversation days ago. You didn't need to - I was worried about you."

"You don't need to worry about me."

"I know I don't _need_ to. Doesn't mean I don't."

She shifts in her place again, turning to her side and letting out a deep breath. "I just...I didn't want to make things weird."

"Things are always weird with you." You say with a small smile, before you can stop yourself.

She makes a quiet, almost offended huffing sound, but doesn't argue.

You weren't sure why she had thought that that would make things weirder than they already usually were, and you knew that that wasn't the main point of this conversation, but it kept nagging away at the corners of your mind, anyways.

There were two possibilities here.

One, she thought it would make things weird because the dream had made her uncomfortable and she hadn't liked it, or two,

she had liked it.

"Did you really think that just flat-out refusing to sleep was a good solution?"

She shrugs a little. Or, at least you think she does. That's what she motion sounds like, anyways. "Yes?"

"You're an idiot."

"Yes?"

You take a breath. Before this, before everything had gotten all weird, you thought the two of you had been getting increasingly more close. On the surface level, you were friends, sure, but beneath that, it had seemed like so much more than that.

There was the constantly decreasing amount of personal space. The little touches. The comfortable silences and the way you’d just both learned to co-exist in a strange, seamless harmony that you’d never experienced with any of your friends before.

You hadn't really talked about it, but something in the dynamic had started to shift. Or you thought so, anyways. You weren't sure what she thought.

And maybe it was because you were tired, and not really thinking clearly, and couldn't quite shake the tingling feeling just beneath your skin, but you wanted to find out.

"Why didn't you tell me about this sooner?"

"I thought it'd make things weird." She repeats, as if that’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for her behavior.

"Weirder than you possibly snooping around in my dreams?"

"Um. Yes?"

"Why?" You ask, the word feeling like that moment right before you jump off a cliff and into the water. 

You’re doing your best to keep your heart from beating right out of your chest, waiting for a response.

The Doctor licks her lips. She's quiet for a beat. "Because we're...friends?"

It sounds more like a question than an answer, and you take a breath. "...Right. Which means you could've just asked me about this instead of driving yourself to the brink of exhaustion."

"No, I-" She starts, and then promptly cuts herself off. Closes her eyes. "Hm. Would you believe me if I said it's because I didn't think of that?"

"No."

"Okay then."

She's silent for a long moment, before taking a deep breath. "Look, it's - I thought I'd just figure it out on my own. I'm not good with that kind of stuff. Talking. I mean I _am_ good at talking, generally speaking, but-" She makes a frustrated little sound. "But just not about that kind of stuff."

You think for a moment. "Doesn't mean you shouldn't try, though. You know you can talk to me about anything, Doctor. Even if it's weird." Then, with a small smile, you add, “Especially if it’s weird. I like weird. I’m still here, aren’t I?”

The Doctor takes a deep breath, turning the situation over in her head.

She had been nervous for so long. She'd been thinking about this for _so long_. She had gone over every possible scenario that this conversation could lead to, and then some. And she was _tired_.

"I...liked it." She finally says, voice a little shallow.

Your heart decides to stop inside your chest.

"I know I shouldn't have, but I did." She continues, not being able to stand the silence that seemed to be just that much heavier now.

"It's okay." You say quietly, not really knowing why. Maybe it's more a meaningless filler response than anything.

She sighs a little. "No, it's not."

You furrow your brows. "Why?"

She's silent for a beat.

"You know I'm not...human." She says, her voice breaking a little towards the end of the sentence.

"Yes, and?" You answer, trying to make it sound nonchalant.

The Doctor furrows her brows at this. "And you...are?"

"Yes, and?"

"You really don't see the problem here?"

You take a breath and try to take the conversation a little more seriously. 

Of course you knew where she was coming from, with this, but that didn't do much to change the way you felt. 

You’d gone over this in your head already, more times than you could count.

"Do you feel like that's a problem?"

"I know it is."

"But do you _feel_ like it is?"

"I-" She starts, and then trails off, never finishing that sentence. It's not like she knew where she was going with it, anyways.

That was a stupid question. She knew it _should_ have been a problem, should have stopped her from thinking about you like that from day one. But that didn’t mean she could entirely convince her hearts to feel like it. 

"So I'll take that as a no, then." You nod to yourself a little. "Doctor, you're allowed to feel things. You're allowed to want things. It’s not a bad thing. And it doesn’t always have to make sense."

You did your best to try not to think about the fact that apparently, the _thing_ in question here, happened to be _you_.

“You don’t think it’s a bad thing?” She asks, suddenly hopeful in a way that felt very foreign in her chest. 

And then she forces herself to face the facts again.

She sighs. "I am so old." She starts, a tired tinge in her voice now.

"I know." You say quietly, trying to offer some sort of shallow comfort.

"No. I am _so_ old, and I-" She rubs a hand over her face, frustrated. "You're just so _young_." She explains, and turns her face to the ceiling. "You're so young and so good and so- I care about you so much and- I don't want to... ruin you. I can't." Her voice sounds... weak.

You don’t think you've ever heard her sound so defeated.

You take a breath, and even though her words break your heart a little, you manage to gather a faint smile to your lips.

"Oh, Doctor. My silly old Doctor. You couldn’t ruin me if you tried." You say softly. "You're like the best thing that’s ever happened to me."

It broke your heart that she seemed to think that somehow she would be bad for you, when every time you looked at her, your first thought was _you are like the sun._

But maybe that’s just something that happens when you live long enough, when you suffer enough. Maybe you start to lose sight of the goodness you’re capable of, the happiness you bring to other people.

The Doctor seemed to be an optimist - about everything except herself. 

"You don't know what you're talking about." She says quietly. "I... you don't understand. I've _done_ this before, I've taken humans along before, pretty girls, just like you, and I _knew_ this would happen, I knew how this would go, I -"

She breathes out and pinches her eyes closed.

Her brain, unhelpfully, finishes that sentence for her: _I knew you would fall in love with me._

Then, a little more quietly, somewhere in the back of her head a different voice echoes; _I just didn't expect to fall in love with you, too._

She proceeds to promptly ignore both thoughts.

"-And I did it anyway. Don't you see? I was selfish.”

“It isn’t selfish to want to...not be alone, Doctor.” You say, shifting in your place a little, trying to hammer it into her head that she deserved good things, too. “You know that, right?”

She stays silent. 

You let out a breath and before fully thinking it through, you reach for her and softly brush the hair away from her face. “Doctor. You shouldn’t beat yourself up for having feelings. Especially good ones.” 

She opens her eyes, and takes a breath, a little shakily. 

To be honest, she hadn’t thought you’d still be there. She’s not sure why, but somewhere in her spiral of negative thoughts she’d completely convinced herself that there was no way this conversation would actually end up _here._ With you looking at her all soft, and human, and so heart-achingly optimistic, and still _there._

She searches your features in the dark for a moment.

And even though you hadn’t actually said it out loud, she knew how you felt about her. Of course she did, she’d known that for a while now. 

The difference now was though that now she knew how you felt about _her_ feelings. And it was _so much better_ than what she’d ever dared to hope for.

For some reason that she can’t quite put her finger on, she feels a strange calmness wash over her. A sense of safety. 

Like something restless inside of her had finally settled.

She doesn’t entirely trust the new feeling yet.

“Especially the good ones.” You repeat quietly, and let your hand brush her cheek softly.

And the Doctor lets herself relax into your touch. 

You shift closer to her in the dark, with some ancient instinctual human effort to offer comfort in the closeness. 

She breathes out, and lets the warmth settle into her bones.

And for the first time in a very long time, the Doctor sleeps without feeling like she needs to keep one eye open. She just rests, now, without worrying about the comfortable glowing something that had settled in her chest.

She leans into it, now. And lets it grow.


	14. The one where things are alright

The Doctor wakes up feeling suspiciously well rested.

It scares her for a moment, and her brain scrambles to pull up her mental defenses. Read the situation, asses it, and adapt accordingly.

She is comfortable, and warm, and-

_Oh._

And there is a hand in hers.

You're curled up next to her, still asleep, with a peaceful expression on your face, and your fingers gently laced with hers.

As her mind is going over a new set of memories from last night and trying to catalog them into a somewhat linear order, her heartbeats pick up pace considerably.

For a moment, she berates herself for being so honest last night, pouring her own problems on you, and making herself so _vulnerable_ , but it doesn't seem to carry much weight. It feels hollow, somehow.

Maybe it's more that she's just used to talking to herself that way, rather than it being rooted in any kind of real feelings.

Because mainly, she just feels _good_.

Sure, she's nervous, but it's a good kind of nervous, now.

Like sailing on uncharted waters.

In the unknown.

And, well, she's always liked that.

She takes a deep breath, and looks over at you. You're still asleep, breathing slow and steady, and the early morning light falling on your features makes you look absolutely ethereal.

And for a fleeting moment, being so close to something so beautiful and so fragile scares her. 

Maybe a part of her still wants to run away just to protect you. And some other, more selfish part wants to stay as close as she possibly can, somehow _also_ to protect you.

It's a weird feeling, a mix of uncertainty, fear, longing and protectiveness.

Maybe she just needed to learn how to settle into this new dynamic. This weird, new, comfortable and warm _something_ that she seemed to have fallen into.

She hasn't been this close to anyone in a long time. Physically, or emotionally.

You stir in your sleep a little, and she can hear the rhythm of your breathing change up a little.

You were waking up.

Judging by the amount of sunlight pouring through the curtains, it was about 7:46 in the morning. A perfectly reasonable human-waking-up time, the Doctor supposes. And judging by the faint smell of coffee floating into the room, Madge was already up too.

"Mornin'." You mutter quietly, eyes still closed and voice a little hoarse from sleep, and with a small, lazy smile on your lips.

The Doctor's first thought is an instinctive _oh no_ , as her hearts feel suspiciously much like they're melting.

Because now, suddenly and without warning, this is what she wants _every_ morning to be like.

She swallows the feeling, or at least tries her best to, and smiles at you. "Morning. So, up and at 'em?"

You hum quietly as some sort of a lazy attempt at a response, stretch a little and settle to a more comfortable position. "Do you have a plan?"

"No." She answers matter-of-factly, tone light.

You chuckle at that quietly.

The Doctor smiles at you, and a part of her wants to stay in this moment forever. Only, some slightly more rational part of her reminds her that that _probably_ wouldn't be the most reasonable course of action now, when there's an impending alien invasion hanging over their heads, and whatnot.

So she sighs quietly, and drags herself out of bed.

The change from the warm bed to the cold morning air hits her harder than she thought it would, and she shivers a little, and tries to cover it up with a twirl.

"Come on! We have some Sontarans to smoke out of here." She says, walking to the table and picking up her screwdriver, twirling it around in her hand a few times for no particular reason other than perhaps to just distract her fingers from the fact that they were no longer holding your hand.

"What do you think the chances are that Madge has custard creams here?"

You're still laying in bed, with absolutely no intentions of moving just quite yet. You stretch again, roll over and settle into a new position, turn to look at her better. "I don't know. Have they even been invented yet?"

Her face settles into a soft frown. "I don't think so." Then she tilts her head a little and her expression clears. "We could do something about that, though."

You groan a little, roll your eyes playfully. "We're _not_ going to mess with the biscuit-invention timeline because you want custard creams for breakfast."

She makes a face that's half offended and half pouting, and not serious at all, and you smile at it, before turning your face to a particularly warm sunbeam, closing your eyes, and just breathing in the moment for a while.

You can hear the Doctor move around in the room, but it doesn't register as much more than mindless background noise. You're too focused on the warmth and the comfort of the moment to pay much mind to anything else.

That is, until you feel a gentle nudge on your shoulder.

"Hmm." You groan, as a vague signal of 'I'm awake, I'm just not going to do anything about it yet'.

"Come on! It's a new day! We have stuff to do."

"Hmm." You crack one eye open, and take a deep breath. The Doctor is practically hovering over you. The early morning sunlight makes both her hair and her eyes look like they're made of gold, almost, and it makes your heart ache a little bit.

 _She really is like the sun,_ you think to yourself quietly.

She's changed back to her clothes from before - a pair of slightly too big slacks, and a collared shirt, that was no longer covered by a sweater. Instead, she was wearing a knit vest with some colorful pattern that almost made your eyes hurt.

And she looked way better in it than anyone should be allowed to.

You breathe out and drag yourself to a half-sitting position. "Alright, alright." She grins, and you run a hand through your hair. "I'm up."

Absent-mindly, without really thinking about it, you reach up and smooth out the collar of her shirt. It had been sitting funny, and you were pretty sure she wouldn't have paid enough attention to her own appearance to fix it herself.

She freezes at the contact, just for half a second, but doesn't say anything. Then, she leans back, breaths out a quiet 'thank you' and turns her attention back to the mismatched assortment of objects on the table.

She still needed to figure out that transmitter.

After changing back to your 50's-disguise too, you walk down to the kitchen to find Madge sitting at the table, reading a newspaper. 

"Good morning!" She sounds chipper as ever. "Did you sleep well?"

"Yes." You both answer, you more casually and the Doctor more nervously.

It feels foreign on her tongue. She doesn't quite feel like it's a lie, but more so like it's a secret that she isn't sure she should share. It’s the truth, but it’s _hers,_ and she isn’t used to sharing those with other people.

Madge smiles. "Great! I made coffee, if you want some.." She says, as sort of a general announcement, and then she turns to the Doctor, who is now leaning to a kitchen counter and peering over at some cupboards.

"Oh, and Caretaker, your box showed up overnight. It's in the garden."

This makes the Doctor's head whip up and her eyes brighten, and she instantly looks around, as if she could somehow see it through the walls. Then she nods to herself and seems to relax visibly. "That's good. Should make dealing with the Sontarans remarkably easier."

"That's the aliens? Is that what they're called?" Madge asks, while standing up from the table and reaching for a porcelain cup on one of the shelves. She then fills the cup with coffee, and silently offers it to you.

"You're awfully comfortable with the idea of aliens." You say, after smiling and thanking her for the coffee. "Not everybody would be."

Madge shrugs a little. "Oh, I know." She answers lightly, and then turns to look at the Doctor. "Do you know these Sontar-whatsits?"

The Doctor purses her lips together. "I'm familiar, yes. Not the best kind of aliens, mind you."

You turn to look at her, too. "What's the best kind of alien?" You ask, curious, over the edge of your floral printed coffee cup.

She almost says _'humans',_ but ends up just looking at you for a moment too long before licking her lips and turning to examine the cupboards again. "Have you got any biscuits?"

Madge nods towards one of the cabinets, and the Doctor immediately walks over to it and stats inspecting the insides.

It's not custard creams, but it is still a type of biscuit, so it'll do. Sitting next to you, she spends a quiet moment munching on them silently. And then she leans closer to you, sticks her nose almost directly into your coffee cup, and takes a deep breath.

She leans back and looks over at Madge. "Can I have some too?"

"Of course, dear." She smiles, and stands up to dig up a third cup. "There isn't quite enough for a full cup, but we can always make more, it'll just be a moment."

"Oh, that's okay, I can just have it dry."

You turn to look at her. _"Dry?"_

If you hadn't known her as well as you did, you probably would've been more surprised. But to be honest, this was, actually, quite on brand for her.

"Yeah, dry. Without the liquid."

"You do kind of need the liquid to make coffee, dear." Madge tries to argue, with slight disbelief in her voice.

"I'm full of liquids." The Doctor states, as if that is a perfectly valid argument.

You take a breath and give Madge a slow shrug.

Madge then proceeds to hand over the jar she keeps her coffee grounds in over to the Doctor silently, sit back down, and watch with a confused/surprised/mildly uncomfortable look on her face as the Doctor prepares her coffee.

She takes the cup, adds several too many spoonfuls of sugar, then a few measures of coffee grounds, and stirs.

You observe this silently, with mild amusement.

The Doctor doesn't drink her coffee, she eats it with a spoon. And she chews it.

You take a breath and turn to look at Madge. "So, the TARDIS just showed up in your garden overnight? I hope she didn't land on your flowers. That would've been a shame."

Madge drags her eyes away from the Doctor, who was now happily crunching on her morning coffee. "Oh, no, don't worry. Appeared right smack in the middle of a quite empty patch of grass."

You smile at her a little. "Good."

"So, what are you going to do about these aliens?" Madge asks, now pretending that the woman in front of her _wasn't_ eating dry coffee grounds. "They're planning an invasion, you said?"

"I'm gonna do what I always do." The Doctor answers with half a shrug.

"Run headfirst at them without a plan, figure it out as you go and hope it works out?" You say with a small smirk.

The Doctor glares at you, but her features are soft around the edges. "I'm gonna stop them." She says with a falsely stern voice.

You shrug at this a bit and smile.

"What do they want?" Madge asks, in a voice that sounds way too casual for anyone talking about alien invasion.

The Doctor stills for a bit, and you can see her jaw tighten.

She isn't sure if she should tell Madge. The woman was still fresh out of a human war, and the Doctor doesn't want her to have to carry the weight of the possibility of a new, alien war.

"Doesn't matter. We'll take care of it." She says, giving Madge a smile she hopes looks reassuring.

Madge nods in a way that looks like she isn't fully satisfied with the answer, but will settle for it, for now.

After all three of you finish your coffee (two drinking, one eating), and some more substantial breakfast on the side, you head out to the garden. Because even if you didn't have a plan yet, now you _did_ have a TARDIS, and that’s almost as good, if not better.

The Doctor grins when she sees the ship. Then, she stops on her tracks and glares at the TARDIS. "I'm still mad at you." She says, matter-of-factly.

It's not very convincing, with the way her eyes were all soft, and the tone of her voice more loving than anything. It's a half-hearted accusation at best.

The TARDIS hums in a light, airy tone, and this makes the Doctor huff quietly and scrunch up her face in a mildly offended way. _"Wherever we need to-"_ She starts quietly, in a 'I can't believe you' -type of voice. Then, she crosses her arms and mutters something under her breath, quietly enough that the humans present couldn’t quite make out the words.

And if they could’ve, they wouldn’t have been able to understand it, anyways. Old high Gallifreyan; it doesn’t translate.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: i don't actually know when custard creams were invented, and i'm too lazy to look it up. in this house we use information i already have in my brain ONLY


	15. The one where the Oncoming Storm makes an appearance

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here u go. Have some Feelings.

"So, what do you say, should we go kick some Sontarans out of orbit?" The Doctor asks, hands in her pockets. 

You smile at her, without really knowing why. 

Maybe it's just your usual 'ready for another adventure' -smile.

Maybe it's because she had finally opened up to you.

Maybe it's because things just felt alright.

"Will you be back for lunch?" Madge asks, voice so casual it felt out of place. 

"We have a time machine now, Madge. We could be back for last week if we wanted to." The Doctor points out, with a small smile playing on her lips and restlessly tapping her fingers against the side of the TARDIS. "But don't worry about it. You've been kind enough already, letting us stay here and all, you don't need to cook lunch for us."

"Nonsense! You're my guests, and I'm going to feed you whether you like it or not."

You turn to Madge and smile at her. This didn't sound like an argument you could win. "Alright. We'll be back for lunch. Saving the world from an alien invasion, and then we'll be back for lunch."

Madge grins, and the Doctor nods, anxious to _go_ already.

"Alright you two, go on, save the world. And be careful."

The Doctor opens the TARDIS doors with a snap of her fingers, and walks inside.

You give Madge a small smile and a wave, and follow the Doctor, closing the door after yourself with a soft _click._

You feel a strange sense of calmness seep into your bones, being back in the box again. Not that you didn't trust that the TARDIS would come back, but...well, you were glad it happened sooner rather than later.

"You're not really going to kick them out of orbit, are you?" You ask, following her to the console and watching her set in the coordinates. She was quick in her movements, and a little jittery, and you quietly wondered if that might have something to do with the coffee. You weren't sure if Timelords responded to caffeine the same way humans did, but this sure did seem a whole lot like that might just be the case. 

"Nah, that would be too much work. I think a good old fashioned threat will do." She says, without lifting her gaze from the console.

"What are you going to threaten them with?"

 _"Me."_ She says in a voice that's low, and stern, and does things to you that just a damn voice definitely shouldn't be able to do.

You take a breath, shake your head a bit, and shrug. "Alright then. Sounds like a plan."

The familiar wheezing of the engines echoes through the room, and soon you can feel the TARDIS land somewhere else - presumably, the Sontaran ship.

"Oh, so _now_ you'll go where I want to go?" The Doctor mutters, looking at the screen on the console.

The TARDIS makes a light thrumming sound and some lights flicker on the control board. The Doctor scrunches up her face a little, as if offended, but settles her hand gently on the controls anyways.

You smile at the interaction quietly. 

She didn't _really_ seem to be mad at the box - more than anything, it seemed to be the 'old married couple' -type of bickering. 

The Doctor shoves the sonic screwdriver into her pocket, patting it down a few times with a small scowl on her face, muttering something about how she doesn't understand how people fit all their important stuff into these. Then, she accepts that the screwdriver will never fit into the pocket properly, sighs a little, and walks out the door.

It doesn't take long to find the bridge of the ship, and the guy in charge. Or, at least, that's what you thought he was - the Sontarans all looked the same, so it was pretty hard to tell.

"I thought I told you lot to get out of here." The Doctor states, arms crossed and shoulders squared, staring down a Sontaran who you guessed to be some sort of a leader. 

"We do not take orders from enemy soldiers!" 

The Doctor squints her eyes a little, and takes a breath. "I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that." 

Then, she takes a step towards the Sontaran, with newfound fire in her eyes. "I am giving you a chance to leave here, before you do anything stupid. Earth will not go to war with you. Not now, not ever. Not under my watch."

She stares at him, waiting for her words to sink in. They don't seem to, because the Sontaran is staring back with a weirdly blank look on his face.

The Doctor takes a breath and grits her teeth a little. "I know you lot aren't known for your smarts, but you've got to have some sort of a records system of previous wars, correct?" She asks, the tone of her voice considerably darker than what you were used to.

"I have fought in a war that was bigger than anything you could ever imagine and took entire races and half the universe with it. Time itself _burned_ in that war. And I want you to take a moment and think about what it must mean that _I'm still here_." She says, with a venomous edge to her voice, now. "I fought the war, and I _won_."

"We will prove ourselves-"

"No, you _won't_." She cuts him off before he could finish the sentence. But you had a pretty good guess about where he was going with that, anyways; Something or the other about the _glory of the Sontaran empire_. 

"There is no point in fighting just for the sake of fighting. And the people of Earth have done absolutely nothing to justify your attack on them."

The Sontaran just stares at her, as if nothing she had just said registered with him at _all_. If anything, it seemed to make him more defensive.

She sighs quietly and closes her eyes for a moment. "You lot are all about strategy, right? Check any and all records you have on the Doctor." 

She takes a breath, and her face settles into a small frown. "And then check the kill count." She says grimly, lifting her chin up and shoving her hands in her pockets. 

There's a dark shadow in her eyes, and the tone of her voice almost makes the hair at the back of your neck stand up.

"Now ask yourselves, do you _really_ want this to be the day you become a part of that statistic?"

"We will not back down from a fight!"

"There _is no fight!_ " She takes a breath. "There doesn't _have_ to be. You can just _leave_. Go have your petty little battles somewhere else, I don't care, just leave innocent people out of it." 

You think about that for a moment, and tilt your head a little. "Don't you have some sort of a rule about that?" You butt in to their argument, trying out a different angle. "Does the Shadow Proclamation have a Geneva convention branch?" 

The Doctor turns to look at you, and you could practically see the wheels turning in her head. 

"Because technically, everyone on Earth is a civilian, to you. They haven't done anything to prompt this war. They don't even know you exist! If you attack them, that's just bad warfare. Attacking civilians is a low blow, you must know that." You continue, hoping this would convince him that attacking would be a bad idea.

The look on the Sontaran's face quivers a little. 

The Doctor turns to look at him again. "If you attack them, even if you win, it won't be recognized as a fair match. It'll never register as a win in your books."

The Sontaran is silent for a moment.

And then he lowers his weapon. 

"The Sontaran fleet will retreat for tactical advantage." He finally says and nods to himself. 

And they do. 

The Doctor stays in orbit for a while, just to make sure.

And maybe also because it gave her something to _do_. Something to concentrate on before going back down to Earth and saying goodbye to Madge. 

She had never liked endings, after all. 

And sure, maybe she would finally go to all those Christmas dinners, but maybe she also was just so used to running from her past that she didn't quite know how to stop.

So for now, she just leans to the console, her eyes fixed on the scanner, and her mind floating somewhere else entirely.

The Doctor feels a strange humming between her ears. Or more so like the absence of humming - which is strange, because she _is_ in the TARDIS again, and the engines provide a steady, familiar background noise.

Maybe it's not the absence of noise. Maybe it's the absence of a feeling.

She walks around the console, for no particular reason, strangely aware of her every movement and of every second of silence.

"Should be fine now. I just wanna make sure they're gone for good." She talks to fill the silence, more to herself than anyone else. "What do you think, old girl? Think you could scan the area, make sure it's clear of alien matter?" She glances at the ceiling. "I mean, besides us?"

The Doctor knows she didn't really need to ask. But talking felt good, and provided her with something to focus on. 

The TARDIS hums quietly, and the Doctor smiles faintly to herself and pats the console a bit.

You sit on one of the steps, quiet. The Doctor does her best to ignore the way she could _feel_ you looking at her.

She keeps absent-mindly turning knobs and pulling levers, half administering the scan and half just keeping her hands busy without really doing anything.

Then, after a moment, you let out a quiet sigh, and out of the corner of her eye the Doctor can see you lean to one of the glowing pillars and cross your arms. 

"You're doing it again." 

The Doctor keeps flipping switches and turning knobs, and doesn't look up at you even though a part of her wants to. "Doing what?"

You lick your lips and tilt your head. "Running."

She stops in her movements, and peers over at you from the other side of the console. 

"I'm right here." She says, pretending she doesn't know what you mean. 

You lean off of the pillar, stand up, and walk a few steps closer to her. "Yeah, and so am I."

She looks at you for a moment, before turning her eyes back to the controls.

"Doctor, you can slow down now."

She takes a deep breath, and aimlessly runs her fingers over some of the knobs.

"It's the caffeine. Makes me all vibrate-y."

The Doctor knows it's not just the caffeine. Her system had filtered that out pretty quickly, burning through the dose quicker than any human. And based on the look on your face, you didn't quite believe that, either.

"I'm just nervous." She finally confesses, her voice feeling just a little bit shallow.

"About what?" You ask, voice soft. The Sontarans were gone, and everything was okay. Right?

She's quiet for a moment.

"The future."

You take a deep breath and look at her, trying to come up with something reassuring to say. Then, when you come up empty-handed, you decide settle for some borrowed words that seemed to fit the purpose. _"And while the future is fast coming for you, it always flinches first, and settles in as the gentle present. This now. This us. We can cope with that."_

"What's that? Byron?" 

She wasn't _that_ familiar with his writings, but it sounded cryptic enough to be something he'd say.

You shake your head and smile at her a little, softly. "Joseph Fink." 

She nods at this a little, considering your words and shifting her eyes to the ceiling. 

Then, you take a breath and gently settle your hand over hers. Her fingers stop flitting over the controls, and she relaxes a little. "You know, Timelord, I think you should be the last person who's worried about the future."

She opens her mouth as if to say something, but then closes it again silently.

"Doctor, I get that you're nervous, and you have every right to be, but please don't run from me because of it. We can figure this thing out together."

She takes a deep breath, and lets herself meet your eyes.

Careful, soft, and the slightest bit of hopeful, she lets herself look at you with the eyes of a lover, now. 

"So, what now?" She asks, voice quiet. 

"Now? Now we go see the stars, Doctor. Together." 

The Doctor smiles. And it's _real_ , and bright, and wonderful, and she can feel the happiness seep into her bones.

She laces her fingers with yours.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That quote is from Welcome to Night Vale. Yall should listen to it.


	16. The one where they fly

The Doctor takes a moment just to drink in the feeling. Just stay in this metaphorical spot of sunlight, for a while.

The bright, warm happiness seemed to run in her veins now, and in between each heartbeat, she could feel herself relax just a little bit more.

She had carried this nervous, out-of-place _something_ in her chest for as long as she could remember, and now it had somehow slowly slipped, and settled, and lodged into place.

There was a strange kind of comfort, now, and even if she didn't quite let herself fully trust the feeling yet, she decided that she liked it.

In some strange way, she felt _safe_.

She knew that safeness was relative, and no-one was hardly ever truly safe, in this ever-changing, burning, flickering universe. Her, especially, if we're counting probabilities - the Doctor was well aware that most days she was either running for her life or running headfirst towards trouble, so really, safety wasn't really something she was that familiar with.

You smile at her, and she knows it's not physiologically possible, but she swears she can feel her hearts grow at least three sizes and start to glow.

The Doctor almost looks down on herself to check, to make sure she hasn't _actually_ started glowing, but this feeling didn't seem to come with the violent burning of regeneration energy, so she hazards a guess that everything’s okay in that front. She keeps her eyes locked on yours.

Maybe it's just one of those things where she was mistaking one kind of sensory input for another. That wasn't unusual; a lot of feelings seemed to get all jumbled up on the way from her hearts to her head. 

So she catalogs that thought over to where she kept all those other warm feelings, and she takes a careful breath, reveling in the absolute _stillness_ of the moment.

The Doctor had never thought she could enjoy stillness, but here we are.

"So. The stars, then. Where do you want to start?" She asks, voice quiet, and soft.

She was letting her mask crack completely, now. Or, at least, she had stopped making an effort to hold it up, and that felt like a step in the right direction.

The Doctor was trying her best to let her feelings show. She didn't quite know how to navigate doing that, yet, and it still made her feel a little bit too vulnerable to truly be comfortable, but she was trying her best to let the honesty bleed through.

Keeping the harsh edge off of her voice was her way of showing that she wasn't trying to run from this, anymore. Letting her expressions be genuine, letting herself settle into the softness of your touch and the comfort of the shared personal space, it was all her trying to say that she was _here_. That this was real. That she wanted this.

She might not know how to talk about her feelings properly, but at least she had stopped hiding them. Stopped running from them.

You tilt your head a little. "Don't we have a lunch to get to?"

She tilts her head in response, mimicking your movements without deciding to do so. "We're in a time machine." She gently runs her fingers over yours, and at least half of her brainpower goes to marveling at how _she could do this, now._

She finally had a hand to hold again.

"Come one, one star. Just a quick trip. Then we'll be back for lunch." She tugs at your hand a little, and lets her lips curl to a small, genuine smile. "One star. You can pick." A hint of excitement creeps into her voice, and her mind is racing with all the possibilities of where she could take you.

Trappist-1 was beautiful this time of the year. Betelgeuse would be the light show of a lifetime. Maybe she could show you the opal cascades on one of the planets around the Sirius system, the ones that flickered like a thousand tiny rainbows in dewdrops when the double sunlight came in from just the right angle.

And as much as she would've liked staying in this particular moment forever, she knows that that isn't a very sustainable plan. So she reminds herself that there will be more time for all of this, and she tries her best to believe it. And then she leans away from the console, careful not to let the distance between you grow too big.

You follow her movements, and she guides you to the door, still holding your hand.

The Doctor wasn't sure if she would ever let go.

She opens the doors, and lets the starlight in.

That's the good thing about being in space; you can always see the stars. Even when it's approximately lunchtime on Earth.

You take a breath and let your eyes travel over the constellations that looked just a little bit distorted like this. The absolute _vastness_ of space never failed to amaze you, no matter how many times you were face to face with it.

The Doctor smiles softly at the look on your face. She's seen the stars so many times now, she doesn't need to turn her eyes away from you to know what the sky looks like. She has that picture burned to the back of her eyelids by now, and honestly, watching you was far more interesting.

"Go on." She nudges you softly, leaning into your shoulder, quietly enjoying the excuse for physical contact. "Pick one."

You take a moment looking over the options, and then you turn to look at her, all shining eyes and genuine smiles.

The Doctor knows this smile - it's the type of smile that really wants to be a grin, but isn't quite there yet. Real, and bright. A little mischievous. 

"That one." You point out the door, and she drags her eyes away from you to look at where you're pointing.

Both of her eyebrows raise in surprise. "That's the Sun."

"I know." You say, in a voice that made her feel like she was missing something extremely obvious. Again.

You keep smiling at her, waiting for her to connect the dots.

Then, after being quiet for a few seconds, she furrows her brows a little. "...You want to go to Madge's lunch?"

Your smile turns soft. "Don't you think she deserves that? Before we run off into the stars, for real?"

The Doctor knows you're right. But that doesn't mean she wants to admit it.

"Time machine." She says, as half an argument and half an explanation, and points somewhere behind her back, in the general direction of the console.

"I know, Doctor." You squeeze her hand a little, in some vague offer of assurance. "But I just feel bad knowing she's out there, worrying."

The Doctor purses her lips a little, and for a moment, her eyes flicker away from yours.

She still didn't like endings.

You move just ever so slightly closer to her, reaching your other hand to softly brush her cheek for no clear reason - it's more of an instinct than an action with any kind of clear intent.

"It doesn't have to be a goodbye, Doctor. We can always go visit her again."

The Doctor lets herself lean into your touch. It's a small motion, barely there, but she feels the soft, warm pressure on the side of her face increase and that's enough to generate some much-needed comfort.

She lets out a quiet breath, and lets the stubborn residual anxiety drain out of her body with it.

"Okay." She says, and licks her lips.

You move your thumb across her cheek in a soft, gentle motion, and the rest of your fingers curl softly against the side of her neck.

Truth be told, she would've much rather stayed right here, just like this, in this moment.

But apparently, the universe had other plans. 


	17. The ending

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're getting close to the End, guys.  
> Despite the title this is, however, not it yet.

The phone on the door of the TARDIS rings, and the Doctor's nervous system can't quite agree on whether she should flinch or just breathe very deeply, so she ends up doing a weird combination of both.

After that, she leans away from you, creating a rift of cold space where the warmth of the mutually shared personal space had been.

She reaches out of the door with a slightly confused look on her face, and after a bit of trial and error, manages to grab the phone.

Somewhere between leaning out of the door and answering the phone, she realizes that she's still holding your hand, and based on the fact that out of all her limbs she only has one leg inside the TARDIS, that's probably pretty much the only thing keeping her from falling out and floating off into space.

You're holding onto her, anchoring you both to the doorway, and it had been so natural, so fluid, that she hadn't even noticed it happening. You had held onto her, because of course you had. That's what you _did_.

The Doctor doesn't quite know how to feel about that - she suspects it's overall a net positive emotion, though - but she doesn't have a lot of time to get that deep into figuring out her feelings right now, because someone's speaking at the other end of the telephone line.

"Hello?" The voice says, and the line crackles a little bit, causing a static-y overlay to tint the voice of whoever was speaking.

"....Hello?" The Doctor echoes, mentally going through a list of people who could be phoning this number. It's not a very long list.

"Caretaker!" The voice crackles. "Will you be back shortly? I wouldn't want the food to get cold."

The Doctor adds a new name to the list in her head.

A sense of quiet relief washes over her - it's not a distress call, nobody needs her help at this exact instant, nothing has gone terribly wrong and it's not those buggers about the Orient express again. It's just Madge. Calling to know when they'll be back. Like the Mum she is.

"Madge?" She asks, quite pointlessly. "How are you even calling this line?"

Out of the corner of her eye, the Doctor can see relief wash over your features too, as your expression clears from cautious confusion to casual amusement.

"You left me with the number."

The Doctor furrows her brows a little. "I did?"

The TARDIS whirs lightly, and the sound doesn't really carry that well all the way outside, but the Doctor is able to make it out anyways. She takes a breath. "I did." She repeats, quietly accepting that apparently the TARDIS was independently meddling with her life, now, and she was just here along for the ride.

"So, are you coming back soon? Did you get rid of the other aliens?"

The Doctor opens her mouth to once again explain the properties and capabilities of time machines, but she swallows the explanation and just settles for an answer instead. "Yes. And yes. We'll be there in a second."

"Brilliant!" The voice of Madge crackles, and despite the distortion, the Doctor is pretty sure she can hear the smile in her voice.

"We'll see you in a bit."

The Doctor hangs up the phone, and reels herself back inside.

"I guess the stars are going to have to wait." She says, with a shadow of disappointment in her voice, dusting herself off. More so to have something to do while moving from one moment to the next than to actually clean off any space dust particles.

A small smirk makes it's way to your lips. Then you point towards the console. "Time machine." You mirror her earlier explanation with a slightly raised eyebrow. "The stars won't have to wait. We can just skip right to the song. Be there whenever the stars need us to be."

The Doctor smiles a little to herself, and walks towards the console. You were right, and the Doctor liked it. This way of thinking - it was more or less unusual for a human, and in some strange way, she was proud of you for it. But then again, she had always picked her friends very carefully.

 _Friends_. The word doesn't quite sit right with her, it feels like it doesn't carry nearly enough weight to represent everything between the two of you. And the way the feeling of your hand in hers lingers on her skin definitely felt like evidence.

She had to let go of your hand to pilot the TARDIS in an even halfway decent way, but the fact that you could help her fly almost makes up for it. So she assigns you to a slice of the control board, points you to the right levers, and walks around to the other side of the console. After all, the TARDIS _was_ designed to be piloted by 6 people. But two could do, if you were very good and knew what you were doing and had a nice enough TARDIS. 

The Doctor sets the system to trace Madge's call, and takes off. 

Like promised, the TARDIS materializes a mere second after Madge had hung up the phone.

And like promised, Madge had made lunch.

The Doctor couldn't remember the last time someone had done that for her.

"So, you sorted everything out with the aliens, then?" Madge asks as a form of greeting, smiling brightly and wiping her hands on a small towel.

"Yes, we did. They shouldn't bother you again for, oh, about the next few decades or so." The Doctor answers, accompanied with a dismissive wave of her hand.

"They shouldn't bother you again." You correct, and this makes some of the worried lines on Madge's face smooth out slightly, even if her expression remains somewhat confused.

The Doctor licks her lips. "Right. Yes." She shoves her hands in her pockets, still slightly disappointed every time she remembered they were exactly as small on the inside as they were on the outside.

They eat from floral printed porcelain plates, in Madge's kitchen, under quietly buzzing light bulbs and surrounded by warm colors, soft textures, and some radio program playing swing music in the background. And it's a small piece of _ordinary_ in the Doctor's life, and it's slow, and quiet, and peaceful, and she just feels surprisingly okay.

She didn't have many moments like this in her life. There was always the running, always the danger, always the impossible decisions between different kinds of bad and worse.

And yes, that was just what her life was like, and she liked it, most of the time. But this, this was good.

The Doctor felt _good_. And not just because of this peaceful little moment, but also because she felt much better about the future, now, too. Or not about the future, exactly, but at least about the present and about what came immediately after. And her relationship with you, whatever the correct definition for that might be, she felt comfortable with it, now, too. 

When it's time to go, Madge makes the Doctor promise to visit again. She promises, and it doesn't feel like a lie.

Leaving does make her feel a little sad, but maybe that's to be expected. And maybe it's the nostalgic, soft kind of sadness instead of the cold, hard, ruthless kind.

Madge hugs you goodbye, and then you're closing the TARDIS door behind you, ready for whatever came next.

"To the stars, then?" The Doctor asks, with a hint of hopeful excitement lacing over her voice.

"To the stars, Doctor." You smile at her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! Despite the title of this chapter, this is NOT the last chapter, or the ending of this story. It'll make sense later. Hopefully.


	18. The beginning

The Doctor grins.

"Alright, old girl. Where-ever we need to go." She says, with her voice gentle and with her hand resting on the controls without doing much of anything.

You lean to the console next to her. "What happened to _'you get to pick_ '?"

It sounds more like an amused comment than an actual question, and the Doctor tilts her head slightly and turns to look at you, a golden glint of happiness flickering in her eyes. "Well, I figured we would've ended up wherever she wants to take us anyways, so better make it intentional every once in a while, don't you think?"

The TARDIS whirs softly, some of the lights on the console flicker, and you smile a little.

And without either one of you really doing anything to prompt it, there's a familiar thrumming echoing through the room, and the ship takes off.

When you land again, the Doctor glances at the monitor, and her face softens to a smile.

"Where are we?" You ask, curious.

The Doctor's smile widens a little, but she doesn't technically answer. Instead, she just leads you to the door.

The doors creak a little as they open. "I believe you'd know this one as the Orion Nebula." She says, her voice quiet, soft, and gentle.

You're met with an infinity of swirls of lights and colors, and the beauty of it all makes your heart swell and damn near takes your breath away.

The Doctor smiles softly at the look on your face. She comes to stand just a little closer to you, and laces her fingers with yours.

"It's considered to be a stellar nursery of sorts. All those lights are stars being born." She explains quietly. "Matter and atoms and life, burning and flickering, morphing into something new. New stars, new worlds, new kinds of existence."

You smile a little at her explanation, and let your eyes travel over the incredible scene unfolding all around you.

"All those colors and lights are different kinds of matter, different kinds of universe building blocks. Swirling clouds of gas and rock and stuff and things, just atoms waiting to form. Settling from one thing into the next. Morphing, changing, floating around, trying to find their place in the universe. Drifting aimlessly until they find a place where they fit, until they find something to cling onto. And then, they become stars."

Her voice is quiet, and soft, and you lean your head on her shoulder. Listening to her talk about space was one of your favorite things - it was beautiful, and you could just hear the love bleed through her voice when she talked about the universe.

The increased amount of physical contact derails the Doctor's thought process for a moment, making her insides feel all warm and funny, and for a second her hearts feel like they might melt again. She licks her lips and tries to get her head back on track.

"-And old stars had to burn out for this to happen, but that's just how it is in this universe. You and me, we wouldn't be here if that hadn't happened. Nothing would, nothing substantial, anyways. We wouldn't have iron or gold or any of the heavier elements without stars dying and exploding and fading out and spreading those things throughout time and space. If some neutron star somewhere hadn't burned out and exploded and flickered out of existence, we wouldn't have the things that make up us. That make up _you_."

The Doctor feels something warm nudge at her hearts. She takes a second to consider this, and licks her lips. "And personally, I'm quite thankful for that specific neutron star for dying."

Her voice feels a little hollow leaving her chest, but she's trying her best to not let that show. She still felt like she was walking on eggshells whenever she was talking about her feelings, but she was trying her best to fight that, now.

The Doctor was safe, with you. Her hearts felt like they were safe, with you, even if her head hadn't completely caught up with that yet.

A few heartbeats pass, and you hum quietly, and squeeze her hand a little. "Me too." You say quietly, careful not to break the moment apart.

The Doctor dares to lean in to your touch, and this makes a small smile settle on your lips.

For a quiet moment, you just stay there and look at the stars.

And then you shift ever so slightly, standing face to face with her, now. "Thank you for showing me this." You say quietly - with how close she was, it would've been a crime to speak with full volume. It would feel like breaking some sort of a spell, almost.

A hint of a smirk plays on your lips for a moment. "It's a pretty good spot for a first date." You add, enjoying the way she seems to get slightly flustered by this.

The Doctor's face freezes for a second, and she licks her lips instinctively. And then her body betrays her, and her gaze falls to your lips without the Doctor giving her eyes permission to do so.

You smile at this a little, and the way she was looking at you made something in your blood run a little warmer.

And with some ancient human instinct and a rush of confidence, you lean closer and kiss her.

You _kiss_ her, and the Doctor's brain goes silent. Every coherent thought flies right out of her head, and she quietly disagrees with everyone who ever said it's impossible to not think anything. And in that moment, she's thankful for the fluidity of her reflexes, because she's able to instantly kiss you back with some bare instincts alone, without having a single coherent thought on the subject, except maybe for some fundamental opinion about how _right_ it felt.

This emptiness in her head only lasts for a second or so, though, because then you're slipping your hands to the back of her neck softly, and suddenly she's very aware of everything, and her skin tingles, and when she breaths out she feels like her hearts have turned to air with the exhale.

The kiss is soft, and slow, and tentative. And it was a weird mix of terrifying and incredibly calming all at once, and for the first time since she could remember, the Doctor didn't feel like the floor could fall out from under her any moment. Even though she couldn't quite register what the floor under her feet felt like because there was some much more interesting sensory input coming in and drowning out everything else at the moment, she felt like she was finally standing on something concrete.

Your fingers brush against the skin at the back of her neck and tangle themselves to the hair there, and goosebumps erupt on her skin, down her spine, and she almost shivers.

The Doctor melts, a little bit, and lets her hands settle on your waist.

This feels _much_ more real than in her dream, and she counts this as a win. The Doctor: 1, the universe: 0.

Somewhere in the back of her mind, she realizes that her eyes are closed, despite her not being able to recall closing them, and the darkness behind her eyelids was speckled with golden lights both from the TARDIS and the nebula on the background. The relative darkness she found herself in seemed to have the effect of making her other senses just that much sharper, and the small sound you breathe out against her lips buzzes in her ears for a moment before going straight to the pit of her stomach.

She swallows, and wraps her fingers around the fabric of your shirt, pulling you closer. You mold your body to her shape, easily, and your lips part in a small smile.

The Doctor could feel her heartbeat hammer against her rib cage, and her brain is buzzing with energy, and every inch of her skin _burns_.

Some part of the her brain that was still stubbornly clinging onto rational thought notifies her that she should move this out of the doorway and into the TARDIS, because at the moment, her footing didn't feel very steady, and she was literally one stumble away from outer space.

Not that the TARDIS wouldn't catch her, probably, but the Doctor didn't really feel like testing that at the moment.

So she makes a small, slightly frustrated sound in the back of her throat, takes a weird half-step into the corridor between the doorway and the console room, and pulls you along with her.

She doesn't have enough functioning brain power to worry about the doors being open, so as for now, they stay open, letting in the light of the nebula.

The Doctor kisses you again, all hunger and desperate need now, and you melt against her and let out a small, slightly surprised moan that makes something at the bottom of her stomach curl. It's new, and strange, and exciting, and the Doctor wants to feel _more_ of it.

She feels her secondary respiratory system starting to wake up and tug annoyingly at her lungs, so she leans away slightly, and rests her forehead against yours, keeping her eyes closed and letting her breathing settle.

Her brain tried to offer her the 'walking a tightrope' -analogy again, but this time, it didn't really feel like it fit anymore. There was no doubt, now, and no danger of falling where she wouldn't be caught.

And the Doctor had been scared, before, that this would feel like closing a chapter of her previous life, an ending of sorts, but it wasn't.

It was a beginning. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is it, babes. The end.  
> You know, unless i change my mind and decide to get back to this later, which is also very much possible. But for now, this is the end.  
> A huge thank you to everyone who stayed with this fic as i stumbled my way through writing it, and anyone who left any kind of positive feedback!! i love you all and reading your comments made me so happy.


	19. Epilogue, part one

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I'm back babey, and i'm bringing all the fluff with me.  
> I just felt like i wasn't ready the let this story and this world go yet, so here we are. i present to you: the epilogue.

The Doctor wakes up to the first rays of artificial sunlight. It wasn't a perfect replication - a bit too murky and just a bit metallic around the edges - but it was warm and yellow and comfortable all the same.

She doesn't bother opening her eyes quite yet. She doesn't need to; the hum of the TARDIS engines, the scent of your body lotion, the feeling of warm bed sheets around her body and the sound of your slow, steady breathing were enough to paint a pretty clear mental picture of her surroundings. And if all that wasn't enough, she could feel you pressed against her side, all soft and warm and _safe_. She could feel your heartbeat, synchronizing with her own.

And so for a moment, she just lays there, perfectly still and perfectly content.

She could taste the dust in the air - her room always seemed to collect more of it than the rest of the ship - and the quiet morning light of the room warms her eyelids.

The Doctor had never been a cat, but she was pretty sure this was how they felt when they found a perfect spot of sunlight. And it wasn't just the artificial sunlight that made her feel like this - it was _everything_. More specifically, it was the fact that you were here with her. In her bed, in her life, in this sunshine moment with her.

The Doctor knew it was silly and medically inaccurate, but she felt like her hearts were full of sunlight, too.

The TARDIS had taken the liberty of cooking breakfast - which was fair, because she was better at it than the Doctor was - and the smell of fresh coffee floats into the room through the air filtration system. It mixes in with the dust floating in the air, and something sweet that reminded the Doctor of a bakery in the morning.

She smiled to herself, sleepy and relaxed and _happy_.

Everything was good. Right now, in this moment in time, as fleeting as it may be, everything was _good_.

And she wasn't mad at the TARDIS for meddling in her life, any more. Not at all. 

Making a mental note of going down to Cardiff to refuel soon and being extra careful with any future repairs and experiments she was planning on doing, the Doctor sinks back into the blissful comfort and absolute stillness of the moment.

After what she approximated to be about one third of a human sleep cycle (she could feel you slipping over from REM sleep and back into consciousness; the heavy air of dreams around you was starting to lift) the Doctor stirs again, lightly. Just enough to be able to see your face when you wake up.

(This proves to be more difficult than originally estimated, because your face is currently pressed into the crook of her neck, which makes it difficult for her to physically _see_ your face. It did, however, make your breath tickle the side of her neck. This was the opposite of a problem, the Doctor figured, and so she let it slide).

She could feel you smile, gently, tiredly, and this was possibly better than seeing it, anyways. Touch had always been a more reliable, more concrete sense than sight, after all.

You hum something into the side of her neck that might have been _morning_ but was really more closely in the ballbark of just a quiet _mmrhhmmh_.

(The Doctor doesn't mind - the meaning carries over anyways. Even humans could communicate messages this simple without words).

She runs a hand up your arm in acknowledgement. "Good morning." She doesn't bother trying to mask the smile in her voice, and you shift a little to settle better into her form.

You wake up slowly. Average rate for a human, really, but slowly for the Doctor.

She might be happy right here, just like this, but she still isn't a very patient person, and she isn't used to spending human-like hours in bed. She has occupied herself by gently running her fingers in your hair, but that's only keeping about 30% of her brain entertained at the moment.

Nudging your side gently, she shifts to finally meet your eyes. She gets another hum in response, this time more attentive.

"Hey."

"Hmmh?" You slowly blink your eyes open, and find her looking at you, her eyes wide open and her hair and absolute mess around her head.

"Can we go check out the lake monsters today?" The Doctor asks, very poorly trying to mask her excitement. The reality of the situation was that she had been awake a lot longer than you had, and she was starting to get bored.

You blink, let out a breathy almost-chuckle, close your eyes and lean back. "Sure,” you smile, "and the old trees."

"And the old trees." She affirms, sounding like the most serious cosmic 5-year old who thinks they're on a very important mission on their back yard.

You run a hand through your hair, open your eyes again, and turn to look at her. "Can we eat breakfast first?"

She takes a breath, and her face settles into a gentle smile. "We can have breakfast first." Her eyes shift to the ceiling - something she did when addressing the TARDIS - and her smile becomes a little crooked. "I think the TARDIS has got that covered."

You raise your eyebrows, impressed. "The TARDIS made us breakfast?"

The Doctor nods, both thankful and proud. She might have been a jack of all trades and a master of many, but cooking, especially when it came to human foods, wasn't one of her strongest areas of expertise.

You smile to the ceiling, too. "Maybe she'll take us where we're trying to go, this time." You say quietly, and the TARDIS whirs lightly.

"Or wherever we need to go." The Doctor adds quietly, picking up your hand over the warm sheets and gently tracing her fingers over yours, absent-minded, in soft patterns.

"Or wherever we need to go."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> can you tell i'm Super Fucking Lonely?


	20. Epilogue, part 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello everyone! Today i woke up to find that i had gotten a bunch of lovely comments on this fic, and that made me think about how i still had this partially written second bit of epilogue just sitting there, gathering dust on my computer. 
> 
> So i decided to finally finish it!

The Doctor crosses her legs up on the chair and wraps her hands around a steaming coffee cup.

The kitchen is warm and dimly lit by the artificial sunlight, and the breakfast that the TARDIS had cooked up is nothing short of perfect. It was one of those moments where time seems to stand still - and maybe it did, you were never sure with the TARDIS - and if you could photograph memories, this would definitely be one for keeping.

Small specs of dust float in the sunlight, and the steady hum of the engines creates a constant, familiar background noise.

(If the TARDIS was a cat, this is what her purring would sound like, you think.)

You eat slowly, and the Doctor almost manages to look like she isn't itching to _do_ something, to go run around history already.

Smiling a little, you pick up your own coffee cup. "The trees aren't going anywhere." You point out, tone light.

The Doctor tilts her head a little and leans back, considering this. "The lake monsters might."

"It's a lake. Where are they going to go?" You ask, mostly rhetorically.

"The land? The sea? Underground cave system? Inter-dimensional portal?" The Doctor lists, lifting a finger for each option.

She reaches for a scone. "They could leave the lake, we don't know. Maybe they're amphibious lake monsters."

"The TARDIS will take us to whenever we need to be there."

In a vague attempt of comfort, you press your thigh against hers under the table. She seems to relax a little, leaning into the point of contact.

"You're probably right. She's smart like that." She dips the scone into her own coffee (which was liquid this time, you note quietly, but still probably had just as much sugar in it than last time).

The TARDIS whirs lightly, and you smile at the ceiling.

"Howcome you've never been there before?" You ask, leaning closer to her in interest. "If you're so keen on going, howcome you haven't gone already?"

She stills, just for half a second. "Never had the time."

"You have a _time machine_."

"Doesn't mean I have all the time in the world."

"That's literally what it means. You do have all the time in the world, you just have to pick and choose where to drop in."

The Doctor tilts her head a little, and focuses on her scone. She’s quiet for a moment. “On second thought, maybe we should go somewhere else. The Russians aren’t my biggest fans. They get angry about all the rainbows.”

“Doctor?” You ask, sensing that she was derailing the conversation on purpose.

After a few seconds of silence, she lets out a breath and finally answers truthfully;

"I don't know what's out there." She says quietly, and then pauses to pick at her scone. None of the pieces actually make it to her mouth. "I don't know what's out there, and last time I dealt with mermaids, a friend of mine almost died."

She avoids your eyes for a moment, which is a powerful type of contact on it's own way, of course.

You give her a small, sympathetic smile, and press a little closer to her under the table.

The conversation is starting to feel like you’ve been here before, like you're going around in circles - she doesn't want to put you in danger. She's scared of the future, and of the unknown. Like everyone, she's scared of the unknown.

"Aren't you the same Timelord that _'eats danger for breakfast'_?"

A ghost of some expression you can’t quite identify visits the Doctor's face for a second, and she squints her eyes briefly, before turning away again. "And you're the same human who only has one heart and who has a terribly soft skin and squishy insides and a lot of fragile parts that can't be replaced."

You take a moment to think that through. Go around the circle one more time.

"Only one heart, and it wants to be with you, Doctor."

You look at her with your softest smile, and she meets your eyes, her expression _raw_.

You reach for her hand over the table. Gently intertwine your fingers with hers.

"I know there's danger, Doctor. There's always danger. But I want to live a life that's _worth_ the danger."

"Don't I get a say in that?" She asks, suddenly looking at you with pleading eyes. "We could park the TARDIS on Earth, live there, have a normal little life, we could plant sunflowers and keep bees-"

She stops talking when you look at her in a way that makes her feel like she would never win with that argument.

"Could you survive a normal little life, Doctor?" You counter, voice both sad and loving at the same time.

She doesn't answer.

_More importantly, could the universe survive if the Doctor decided to retire?_

"Don't I get a choice?" She asks, and it sounds a little like she's begging.

You breathe out and tighten your grip on her hand a little. "Of course you do. It's your life - you're allowed to do whatever you want with it. But I don't want you to change because you're scared."

The Doctor is a traveler, after all. She is a runner and a wanderer. Could one corner of one planet ever be enough for her?

(It could, if it was with you, she thinks).

She leans closer to you, but doesn't answer. She's still staring at some imaginary point on the table. The TARDIS whirs quietly, in a tone that sounded distinctively worried.

"Besides, I'm not ready to let this life go yet. There's still too much universe to see, too many planets to save." You continue quietly.

She finally, finally meets your eyes, and just looks at you with an undeniably raw expression on her face. She blinks, slowly, and then swallows.

"I just don't want you to get hurt." She finally says, and her voice sounds both heavy and hollow at the same time.

"I know." You answer quietly, and press closer to her again.

Gently, you turn your intertwined hands wrist up, running your thumb on her skin in a calming motion. "It takes bravery to be soft, Doctor." You note, quietly. "To let yourself be vulnerable. I think that applies to you letting _me_ be vulnerable, too."

Then, you smile at her, and hope with all your might that she could see herself the way you saw her. "And you're the bravest person I've ever met."

She gives you a weak smile, one that looks like she doesn't believe it in the slightest.

You breathe out, and the TARDIS _beeps_ , and two steaming mugs of tea emerge inside the small cabinet next to the table. Tea - calming. Comforting. Good.

You use your free hand to pick the mugs up one by one, gently placing the other in front of the Doctor.

"We can go back to Earth. Find a nice little Earth home." You say gently, with half a shrug. "We can plant sunflowers and keep bees, if you want. We can do that. But we can also travel. It doesn't have to be one or the other."

Some warmth makes it's way back to the Doctor's eyes, and she tilts her head a little. "Can we get one of those tiny little cottages with moss on the roof?"

You smile at this, a warm, genuine smile.

She didn't want to stop traveling - she just didn't want that to be the only option. She wanted there to be a place on Earth, too - a place for you. A safe place somewhere far away from the deep dark corners of the universe, somewhere calm and quiet and human.

"Yes. We can get a tiny cottage with moss on the roof." You nudge her a little under the table. "Would you make it bigger on the inside?"

"Oh, of course."

You smile, and it tugs at something in the Doctor's hearts.

She starts picking at her scone again, this time to actually eat it. You wrap your fingers around the warm teacup, breathing in deeply to enjoy the scent of it.

All is good.

Well, almost all.

The Doctor keeps trying to put her hair behind her ears, but it keeps falling back on her face. You put down your cup and shift in your place, running your hands through her hair. She leans into the contact.

"Do you want me to braid it for you?"

She nods, and you get to work. The room is silent, and the artificial sunlight is starting to get warmer, and the Doctor hums quietly, tilting her head back and closing her eyes.

When you're done, you lean your head on her shoulder, and give her a gentle kiss on one cheek.

The TARDIS _beeps_ quietly.

"Well, then. Towards new adventures, Doctor?"

She looks at you and smiles, and the blood in her veins feels like liquid sunlight.


End file.
